Ten years ago, the actor Jessica Chastain came roaring out of relative obscurity and became an instant movie star. A 2003 Juilliard grad, she’d been working in theater and television for years—but her 2011 marked one of the more impressive breakout runs in recent memory, beginning with Jeff Nichols’s Sundance hit Take Shelter, continuing with the Cannes debut of Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, and then popping big that summer with The Help, for which she received a supporting actress Oscar nomination. (Chastain also had three other films released that year; whew.) It was quite a way to introduce herself to a broader audience, and while she has done interesting work since, probably nothing could match the sizzling highs of that most auspicious year.
But now, a decade later, Chastain seems ubiquitous once more. There was, of course, the now meme-famous video of Chastain and her Scenes from a Marriage co-star Oscar Isaac on the red carpet at the Venice Film Festival, a flirtatious bit of theater that had the pair Twitter trending for several days. And then, here at the Toronto International Film Festival, Chastain is the star of two new films, both performances reminding us of her beguiling capabilities.
The first is The Forgiven, a curious, grim social drama from filmmaker John Michael McDonagh (brother of Martin). In the film, which is based on Lawrence Osborne’s 2012 novel, Chastain plays Jo, a bored and wealthy wowman who, while driving to a bacchanal at an estate way out in the Moroccan desert, is in a car accident. Her husband, David (Ralph Fiennes), has run over and killed a Moroccan teenager. The pair, icy and arch, continue on their journey with the boy’s body in the car. While David travels off to deal with the boy’s grieving father, Jo stays behind at the weekend-long party, flirting with a brash American businessman (Christopher Abbott), doing coke, and saying lots of pointed things.
It’s a departure for Chastain, who has played many saints and innocents in the last decade, from a noble zookeeper’s wife to a heroic astronaut. Sure, she’s also played an X-Men villain, the toughie Molly Bloom, and a deadshot assassin—but we haven’t quite seen her in this barbed mode before. It’s nice to watch her letting her hair down and having some fun, of the wicked and cynical variety. The Forgiven is mostly David’s story all the way to its rather bleak ending, but Chastain pulls focus whenever she can, operating as one of the film’s main resources of levity and acerbic bite. I wish the movie had more of that energy—McDonagh keeps the proceedings oddly muted given the circumstances—but at least Chastain is there, pepping things up a bit.
And then there is her second, splashier TIFF title, The Eyes of Tammy Faye, a biopic of sorts in which Chastain plays the late, dubiously great Tammy Faye Messner, wife of disgraced televangelist Jim Bakker and a TV star in her own right. Michael Showalter, of comedy fame, directs the film, but he doesn’t take a sneering approach to the material. Neither does Chastain, who nonetheless goes for broke.
It’s become de rigueur, of late, for actresses to do these acts of iconic becoming. Natalie Portman scored an Oscar nomination for her bold and riveting turn as Jackie Kennedy; Renée Zellweger won an Oscar for her feverish Judy Garland; Kristen Stewart goes all out in the accent department in the upcoming Princess Diana fantasia Spencer. And now Chastain is doing her own Big Performance, complete with an Upper Midwest chirp and lots of prosthetics.
It would be easy to get lost in all that technical detail, to figure the impression—both physical and vocal—is enough. But Chastain digs deeper than the aesthetics, and locates something crucial in Tammy Faye. It’s a genuine, deep-seated, perhaps ruinously naive compassion, which Chastain illustrates with great care. She shows compassion for Tammy Faye too, avoiding nearly all the easy cliché of playing an ambitious rube who is, just maybe, also a huckster. Tammy Faye was a complicated person—she was closely connected to a wild practice of grift and fraud, but was also a true believer in God and humanity—and Chastain gives her the complex portrait she deserves.
After seeing the film, I worried to a colleague that some viewers might register only the vocal acrobatics and the makeup and the wigs, and will find the whole thing silly, outsized, an unwieldy piece of actorly ego gone awry. But maybe the fact that the performance will be polarizing—just as Portman’s was, just as Stewart’s seems destined to be—is a testament to the dizzying height of the work. It’s not going to be for everyone, but to my mind, Chastain hasn’t popped off the screen in quite the same way since The Help, a flawless performance in a wobbly (or worse) film.
Her performance in Tammy Faye entirely lacks irony, even if sometimes Showalter seems to be pointing the film in that direction. Chastain is stronger than what’s around her, including her co-star Andrew Garfield as Bakker. He gets a bit whiny and grandiose as consequences start closing in on the couple, while Chastain fluidly adjusts.
The film contextualizes the Tammy Faye and Jim story as a crux moment just before the hard-right faction of the Evangelical movement took over and brought so much American culture to where it is now. I wish the film was a bit more thoughtful, a little sharper in how it considers those seismic shifts. Jerry Falwell stalks through the film in the form of Vincent D’Onofrio, but it would be helpful—and more poignant—if Showalter and screenwriter Abe Sylvia went to greater lengths to delineate what the ramifications of Falwell’s movement, and the Bakkers’ fall from grace, meant for the entire country’s religious temperament.
Though I suppose that might be another movie, while this one is chiefly concerned with the mechanics of Tammy Faye’s life—from innocent and spirited Bible college student to lavishly living TV queen with tattooed lip liner. Even if the film moves a bit hurriedly and perfunctorily through the major timeline beats, Chastain credibly, measuredly evolves throughout. And yet, despite all that meticulous work (it’s not mimicry exactly; it’s more a successful attempt to echo the spirit of a person), she still seems loose, human, improvisatory, as at ease putting on a puppet show as she is having a pill-addled breakdown. That’s the evidence of someone who has a firm command on what they’re doing. She’s a thrill to watch, and I hope Chastain doesn’t have to wait another ten years until she can do something this grand and captivating again.
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