Titus Kaphar, painter, speaker, and now filmmaker, delivers a slow-building knockout of a film with a semi-autobiographical message in Exhibiting Forgiveness. Tarrell (André Holland) and Aisha (Audra Day) have a beautiful marriage, happy life, and successful careers. But Tarrell wakes up screaming some nights, and he can’t shake the anger he has at his father. When his mother Joyce (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) engineers a reunion with her husband and Tarrell’s father, La’Ron (John Earl Jelks), Tarrell must confront their mutual past and decide how he can move forward to live his best life.
Holland and Day have natural chemistry, and show how marriage can both be beautiful and hard at the same time. Tarrell is a painter; Aisha is a singer. Together they’re parenting and forging life successfully. But Joyce’s reluctance to move in with them leads them to spend more time in Tarrell’s home town, and the reentry into his old world sets off some detonations in his heart and their lives.
In the recent past, La”Ron has overcome his addiction, and found Christianity. It’s a Christianity that Joyce had embraced earlier, but which seems trite to Tarrell. He can’t understand how Joyce would forgive someone who hurt her as badly as La”Ron did. He doesn’t think changing one’s person or heart just automatically wipes away the pain the person called (and he’s right). But he does agree to talk with La”Ron about the past, and the struggles that led him to hate his father so much.
Cinematographer Lachlan Milne (Minari, Love & Monsters, Stranger Things) helps Kaphar find the perspectives he wants the audience to see the story from. It’s intimate, certainly, and emotionally stirring, because family is tricky and forgiveness is … hard. For me, one of the side effects of the watching the movie is that I reflected on how impossible it is to forgive someone if you don’t recognize how you’ve been forgiven, and potentially, if you don’t see the fingerprints of God in your life. Forgiveness just isn’t possible. It’s improbable, supernatural, and mystifying. We’re not naturally wired to let go of our hurt; society tells us that we should cling to it, grip it, and use it for motivation.
And maybe that’s the other biggest takeaway I had: Tarrell comes to grips with the way his father treated him by recognizing how his father was raised, and that the treatment he received drove him to become the man he is. What does that look like for us as we consider our own suffering? What can we learn about how we grew because of the tragedies we experience or the pain that comes to us? Is it all necessary in the long run? Can we actually grow without it?
Exhibiting Forgiveness is a deft study of one man’s art, pain, and growth, wrapping around the idea that to be who we’re called to be, we’re going to have to consider forgiveness.
