Fall from Grace

This must be the nadir of Kevin Spacey's career. Who ever thought he'd be a good person to play TV evangelist, philanderer and chipmunk look-a-like, Jim Bakker?! The poor man does his best with cotton wool stuffed in his cheeks (hey! It worked for Brando!) and a toupee that could stop traffic. Bernadette Peters does an equally brave job of portraying bushbaby bimbo Tammy Faye Bakker, a woman who is truly without any merit or value. This is a very bad movie, but is never less than entertaining in that slow motion carcrash kind of way... God bless you Jessica Hahn for exposing these morons for what they are! It is you that is the instrument of the Lord!

Jessica Chastain's recent Oscar win for "The Eyes of Tammy Faye" drew my attention to the Bakkers. I had heard about them for years and only loosely understood the scandal surrounding them.

Anyway, I found this 1990 TV movie about the Bakkers. "Fall from Grace" casts Kevin Spacey as Jim and Bernadette Peters as Tammy Faye. Although I liked learning more about what happened, I feel like the movie limited its focus too much. I would've liked to see a reenactment of Tammy Faye's interview with an AIDS-afflicted man where she asked how people calling themselves Christians can turn their backs on those in need.

Anyway, after the depicted events, Jim spent a few years in jail, but now hawks all sorts of shady products. When he did a retrospective of his career, he completely omitted Tammy Faye! Tammy Faye, meanwhile, became a gay icon and starred in a documentary called "The Eyes of Tammy Faye", not to be confused with the 2021 movie (she died in 2007). As for Kevin Spacey, he suffered his own fall from grace in 2017. Strange how these things work out.

Crawling around like Spider-Man. And then in the more recent movie, one of Spidey's actors played Jim!

"Judge not lest ye be judged". True, but this little twerp Bakker is guilty as sin. He thinks it is fine to cheat on his spouse but when he is caught it's "hey, it was just this one time and, hey, I'm real sorry Jesus". This whining, blubbering clown could have been a success had he stayed true to his calling instead of selling out to the Gods of power, sex, money, drugs and vanity. How could anybody be gullible enough to fall for the spiel of these 2 God hollering bozos? There was enough plastic in them to produce enough 4" schedule 40 pvc to totally re-pipe the state of Texas. These 2 losers deserved each other and the fate they suffered. Good flicker with the 2 leads being played to perfection; almost had me believing they were the genuine article. I'll never trust another televangelist....hell, I didn't anyway.

"Fall From Grace" only aired on NBC twice way back in 1990-91 sometime. Then the film was shelved, and as far as I know it hasn't re-aired anyplace else.

Kevin Spacey (playing Jim Bakker) and Bernadette Peters (playing the now-former Tammy Faye Bakker; who since remarried and became Tammy Faye Messner) both turned in stellar performances. Bernadette's singing left a lot to be desired, versus the real Tammy's fantastic singing voice.

However, this movie was typical "Hollywood hype" if you ask me. It really was not an accurate portrayal of either the Bakkers nor the Christian empire that was known as Heritage USA and the PTL Club.

It seemed that most of the movie was shot on a Hollywood sound stage. It would have helped to at least shoot some of the scenes on location there in South Carolina on the former Heritage USA property.