The Eyes of Tammy Faye (12A, 123 mins)
Verdict: Mostly sympathetic biopic
Rating: 
Moonfall (12A, 120 mins)
Verdict: Rocket-fuelled nonsense
Rating: 
Some movies don’t travel well, and The Eyes Of Tammy Faye is this week’s example. But that doesn’t mean it’s no good.
It’s a superbly acted account of the rise and fall of Tammy Faye Bakker (Jessica Chastain) and her husband Jim (Andrew Garfield), who became high-earning stars of what, from a British perspective, is the mystifying phenomenon known as Christian televangelism.
Ours is not a country — and thank heavens for it — in which a company called Praise The Lord Television could ever grow into a mighty broadcasting network.
But in America it did, becoming the fourth-biggest behind the behemoths NBC, ABC and CBS.
Pledges rolled in day and night as the Bakkers, an evangelical ‘Ken and Barbie’, told viewers that the more they gave, the more God would love them. For the best part of two decades they and their ministry duly grew richer and richer.
Then, in 1987, it emerged that Jim had been misappropriating funds, even using some to pay off a church secretary who alleged he had raped her, which he denied.
The film belongs to Jessica Chastain who is wonderful, conspicuously relishing Faye’s increasing reliance on cosmetic fakery. Pictured: Chastain as Faye in The Eyes of Tammy Faye
Shortly afterwards, with a contributory heave from rival televangelist Jerry Falwell (Vincent D’Onofrio), the Bakkers’ gaudy temple came crashing down.
It’s a fascinating story, which we might expect director Michael Showalter, whose background is in comedy, to tell in riotous fashion.
Yet he and screenwriter Abe Sylvia pull their punches, preferring to focus on how Tammy Faye was much more sinned against than sinning.
It’s kind of a Sue Gray Report of a film, meticulously done but a little gummy where its teeth should be.
Then there’s that problem, at least from this (less gullible or, if you prefer, comparatively godless) side of the Atlantic, of comprehending quite how televangelism casts its extraordinary spell and how its first couple, its wholesome Ken and painted Barbie, made their millions. In truth, this is the question the movie never quite answers.
Garfield does a fine job of showing how flawed Jim was, how preeningly self-centred, how wheedlingly in thrall to Falwell and the other high priest of proselytising TV, Pat Robertson — but not how his charisma reached out of the screen and into people’s pockets.
Pictured: Andrew Garfield and Jessica Chastain in The Eyes of Tammy Faye
Really, as befits the title, the film belongs to Chastain. She is wonderful, conspicuously relishing Tammy Faye’s increasing reliance on cosmetic fakery (to the point where her nails are so long she needs a nail file to open a can of her beloved Diet Coke), yet somehow always keeping the character sympathetic.
Though a talisman of the Christian Right, Tammy Faye espouses the decidedly unfashionable view in those circles that homosexuality is not a sin, that everyone is equal in the eyes of the Lord.
The story begins in 1952. Tammy Faye is the eldest of eight children growing up poor in smalltown Minnesota, with an unsmiling, austere, God-fearing mother (Cherry Jones).
By the turn of the 1960s she has met Jim, and at first their marriage is happy but little by little it falls apart, with infidelities on both sides that astoundingly they manage to monetise, tearfully confessing their transgressions on TV and getting even more donations in return for their ‘humility’.
Eventually, inevitably, the bubble bursts. Jim goes to jail and Tammy Faye, her face ever more grotesquely made up, becomes an object of public ridicule. An attempt to get back on television founders miserably.
Yet onward she marches, a Christian soldier right to the end of a film that, for all its own flaws, stands as an unexpectedly moving testament to the endurance of the human spirit.
Moonfall is a sci-fi disaster-thriller so silly that at times you wonder whether it’s a comedy
Another fall from grace looms large in Moonfall, a sci-fi disaster-thriller so spectacularly silly that at times you wonder whether it’s a comedy in a space-suit disguise.
Pat-rick Wilson and Halle Berry play U.S. astronauts Brian Harper and Jo Fowler, who reunite ten years after their lunar mission went badly wrong, a misadventure that led to Harper’s disgrace.
This time their mission is to set the moon back on course after it falls out of orbit, with ‘city-sized pieces of moon debris’ bombarding Earth, and great coastal cities devastated by floods.
Meanwhile, a hapless British conspiracy theorist, K.C. Houseman (John Bradley from Game Of Thrones) thinks he knows the reason why: the moon is made, not of green cheese, but by aliens, and is now being weaponised.
The thing is, KC and his sunshine band of fellow-nutters are dead right. Cue another trip into space to save humanity, all of which is done with terrific energy, awful dialogue and iffy special effects.
The director and co-writer is Roland Emmerich, who gave us Independence Day, Godzilla and 2019’s bloated war film Midway, and should perhaps now be encouraged to have a lie down in a quiet room for a year or two.
My advice is, if you feel a gravitational pull towards the cinema, fight it with all your might.
ALSO SHOWING: TILDA AND DAUGHTER TEAM UP (AGAIN) FOR A MIDDLE-CLASS TREAT
The Souvenir Part II (15, 107 mins)
Rating: 
Jockey (15, 94 mins)
Rating:
British director Joanna Hogg has made two autobiographical features about a formative period in her own life, when she was learning her craft at film school in London in the 1980s.
The first of them, 2019’s The Souvenir, was a curiously absorbing picture, fashioned around a slightly uneasy yet somehow riveting performance by Honor Swinton Byrne, making her big-screen debut as Julie, Hogg’s alter ego.
The follow-up, The Souvenir Part II, continues the story where the first film ended, with Julie grieving the death of her heroin-addict ex-boyfriend.
Happily for us, if not for her, Julie does her mourning at the grand country home of her ineffably posh parents, meaning more screen time for the glorious Tilda Swinton, Byrne’s real-life mother, and the quietly excellent James Spencer Ashworth. Some of their scenes together are very funny.
Better still, we also get more Richard Ayoade this time, having a blast as an arrogant fellow student of Julie’s
Pictured: Joe Alwyn, left, and Honor Swinton Byrne in a scene from The Souvenir Part II
But commendably, Hogg hasn’t just dished up more of what went down well first time round.
This is a far more ambitious film, inventively blurring the distinction between what is real and what is make-believe.
Hogg’s pictures, with their frightfully middle-class themes, aren’t always my cup of Earl Grey. But this one is splendidly original.
I also liked Jockey, a touching drama sensitively directed and co-written by first-timer Clint Bentley.
It is set mostly in Phoenix, Arizona, where Jackson (Clifton Collins Jr) is a jockey grudgingly coming to terms with the ageing process.
Alarmingly, he increasingly feels numb in his right side, and doesn’t want to let on to his supportive employer, Ruth (Molly Parker), especially as she has found a promising horse for him to ride.
But on the upside, he also has a new protégé, a young jockey, Gabriel (Moises Arias), who claims to be his son.
It’s a beautifully shot film and nicely acted, although it also uses real people from that world of small-track horse-racing, giving it a strong whiff of authenticity.
