The Eyes of Tammy Faye

Leave it to Pat Boone to serve up the shrewdest insight in this fluffy but outrageously entertaining portrait. Scrape off the make-up and blot up the tears and Tammy Faye Bakker becomes Hillary Rodham Clinton, an earnest do-gooder who suffered for her husband's sins. And like Hillary, Tammy won't settle for a quiet corner in the celebrity sun.

Well before E! or Behind the Music, directors Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato were honing the brand of shlockumentary they cook to perfection here. Three parts dish to one part news, the recipe is just right for capturing the defrocked diva of the evangelical movement. If you thought Jim and Tammy were ghoulish in their late years, think again. The filmmakers locate mind-blowing early footage, when Jim's spud of a head looked especially well-shellacked. The couple's televangelism empire, we find out, began with a children's puppet show on a fledgling Christian network. Drunk on this stranger-than-fiction tidbit, the directors use talking sock puppets to introduce various sections of their tale, and it's a bad and smarmy idea. (RuPaul's breathless narration doesn't help either.) Much better is staging a reunion between Tammy Faye and the journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for unmasking the Bakkers. She arrives in a red leather jacket and knee-high boots; he leaves with her autograph. The film plays up Tammy's embrace of gay men, including AIDS patients otherwise demonized by the Christian right. And it follows her today through the rough waters of a celebrity afterlife as she pitches crummy talk-show ideas to network executives. Thank the Lord, for Tammy's sake, that none of these has come to pass. At the Avon.
-- Scott Heller