Our Not So Fair Ladies

     The Eyes of Tammy Faye

     The queen (and I’m not referring to the narrator, RuPaul) is not dead.  Long live the queen, Tammy Faye Bakker.  Big-haired ladies everywhere, rejoice!  And crabby old movie critics, too!  Documentaries are a rare breed in today’s movie megaplexes, and this is one of the rarest, the story of a good old girl born (so her family claims) with a neat manicure, who rose to a dubious stardom as half of a pair of Christian puppeteers, later media moguls, then sank into oblivion after her husband and fellow evangelist Jim was sent to jail for embezzling funds sent in by true believers.  (And here, I should emphasize, as she does, that she was never charged with anything.)  But, the pore thang then got herself hitched to a gentleman who got himself sentenced to two years for fraud.

      In the 1980’s, the Bakkers were a sort of guilty pleasure for people who watched them as rejects from a Flannery O’Connor story.  Some Christians were horrified by the glitz and greed, but Tammy Faye always had a kind of earthy honesty about her, which coupled with a natural chemistry with television, gave her much more strength than her husband.  

     In fact—to my surprise—I was captivated by the lady throughout this documentary.  There are a lot of predictable words—a survivor, an American original—even, perhaps, a reject from a Flannery O’Connor story.  But, I had the feeling that she has done her share of suffering (including drug addiction during the time that she and her husband were at their most famous), and expected her to belt out “I Will Survive” at any moment.  That anthem of disco tackiness (prominently featured in the current film, The Replacements) might explain a subtext of this film, narrated by RuPaul.  (Who would ever have believed that the two most famous drag queens in America would be two Georgia boys, RuPaul and The Lady Chablis of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil?)

     Unlike most televangelists, Tammy Faye was always accepting of gays.  In the documentary, there is even a clip from one of her shows of her interviewing a minister who had HIV, and she treats him with a compassion that was unusual anywhere back in those early days of the disease. 

      So, who is Tammy Faye, some little league celebrity who is aiming for seventeen minutes of fame, with this authorized, perhaps sanitized documentary?  Or, is she one of those people who genuinely make us consider the possibility of angels in our midst of whom we are not aware?   This documentary leaves us with rather mixed reviews, because there is a distinct impression that the filmmakers are much more comfortable with celebrities than with angels.  

    Saving Grace

     No matter how veddy, veddy Anglophile you may be, you have to admit that Saving Grace has no more redeeming social value than an old Cheech and Chong movie.  I just don’t see the humor in smoking pot, not even when the pot smokers are British women of a certain age who sound as if they could have voiced some of the characters in Chicken Run.  I’m not just riding some wave of political correctness.  Many years ago, I never got the point of Lee Marvin’s famous portrayal of a drunk in Cat Ballou. 

      It is too easy to get a laugh, either from a drunk staggering or from a pot head pigging out.  In fact, as I watched this film, it was as if it were filmed in some sort of cinematic equivalent of hypertext, with links to other films that over the past thirty years or so have tired to convince us that there is something funny about marijuana. 

      There is not so much a plot as a situation.  Grace learns on her husband’s death, that he has left her nothing but debts. Her foreman Matthew convinces her to grow marijuana in the greenhouse, in which she has always grown orchids.  And the locals look on, somewhere between complacent and conspiratorial. 

      It all reminds me of Waking Ned Devine, with less appealing scenery.  It takes a village to turn a moral dilemma into a comic affirmation. But, it’s hot outside these days, and Blethvyn makes it a joy to sit in a cool dark place watching Grace survive.  I don’t think I’m spoiling anything for anyone if I say that Grace neither sells her produce nor gets evicted.  But, the ending feels a little untrue to the rest of the material.  Appearances, my dears, must be maintained.  Now, who’s for tea?  And, I do mean tea, not that brew that is consumed with such gusto in this film.