Andrew Garfield wears a Rolex Datejust

On a sunlit patio dressed with hanging plants and white wicker, Tammy Faye Bakker throws her head back and sings. This is The Eyes of Tammy Faye, the 2021 film about the televangelists who built an empire on faith and television and then lost it, and Jessica Chastain plays Tammy Faye so completely that she won the Academy Award for it. A few feet away, mostly outside the song, Andrew Garfield sits as her husband Jim, a fluffy white cat draped across his lap. He is the picture of soft prosperity. On the wrist that strokes the cat, catching the afternoon light, is a lot of gold.

It is a Rolex Datejust, and it is doing everything a Rolex Datejust was designed to do. The case is yellow gold and the bezel is fluted, machined into that ring of fine teeth that catches light from across a room. The dial is a deep sunburst blue, with a date window at three sitting under the little magnifying bubble Rolex puts over the date. The bracelet is the Jubilee, the five-row design of small links that Rolex first made for the Datejust in 1945. There is no day spelled out at twelve, which is the single detail that separates this from its grander cousin, the Day-Date. So it is not the ultimate Rolex. It is the one just below it, which on a television preacher is its own kind of statement.

That is the thing about a gold Rolex on Jim Bakker. The real Bakker preached the prosperity gospel, the belief that God rewards the faithful with material wealth, and he and Tammy Faye built PTL into a television ministry that took in millions before it fell apart in the late 1980s. A gold Rolex is the prosperity gospel you can wear. The costume department did not have to invent anything here, because the man really did live this way, wrapped in gold and the soft furniture of a faith that paid very well, until the money ran out and the federal government got involved.