Titus Kaphar’s luminous directorial debut, “Exhibiting Forgiveness,” featuring another electrifying turn by the always-captivating André Holland, begins with a James Baldwin quote. “If the relationship of father to son could really be reduced to biology, the whole earth would blaze with the glory of fathers and sons.”
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It’s a bruising quote, given the context of the personal and aching movie, a superbly incandescent but wrenching tale of generational pain, inexcusable parental mistakes, the legacy of family trauma, and, at its core, a broken father/son relationship. It’s also a raw, intimate movie about forgiveness, obviously, and healing, but it asks harsh, even emotionally confrontational, questions about wounds that cut too deep to absolve. It’s a film about the struggle to reconcile the past and how sometimes the torment of childhood is too shattered to consider repair.
The devastating portrait of fragmented relations also suggests another potent Baldwin quote relevant to the drama: “Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” It’s a heartrending and profoundly poignant drama that will likely leave you weeping and interrogating your own past and familial relations for days on end. It’s also a magnificent directorial debut for artist-turned-filmmaker Titus Kaphar, who is already internationally renowned as a painter but should brace for the way this exceptional cinematic introduction could alter the direction of his career should he choose to embrace it.
André Holland stars as Tarrell, a dutiful father and successful painter. His loving wife, Aisha, played by an excellent Andra Day, is also a successful singer-songwriter, and their affluent life seems to be made perfect by their gorgeous son, Jermaine. But the truth is, as one line of dialogue suggests, Tarrell doesn’t face his pain; he paints through it and around it. Art is his coping strategy, and he excavates trauma through carefully considered brushstrokes. But it’s still part defense mechanism; he’s still haunted and wracked by violent nightmares of his past that are beginning to unravel his life and alarm his family.
Concurrently, another story unfolds of a homeless black man, La’Ron (stage actor John Earl Jelks, also tremendous), living on the streets, addicted to crack. A bystander victim in a robbery, he eventually finds refuge at his brother’s house. And as these two stories start to track, it becomes clear that La’Ron is Tarrell’s long-estranged father.
As the tortured artist’s evocatively excruciating dreams worsen and a new art show deadline appears, his tensions are exacerbated by having to move his mother, Joyce (another remarkable performance by the incomparable Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), who seemingly doesn’t want to pack or even leave.
It’s here where old lacerations gash open as mama Joyce bum-rush surprises Tarrell with the unexpected and unannounced visit from his father in an attempt at reconciliation that makes the artist apoplectic with rage.
From there, “Exhibiting Forgiveness” is an unflinching, visceral, and intense struggle between two men, one desperate for reconciliation, the other seemingly incapable of looking past the psychic traumas his father inflicted on him and his mother. Engrossing throughout, some of the flashback sequences to a young Tarrell being berated by his overbearing father are almost too emotionally severe to bear, scarring anguish that reminds the viewer why this suffering is too difficult to pardon. Mind you, it’s well-considered and evades trauma porn and what people dismissively describe as miserabilist or wallowing; it’s just distressingly, naked real, and emotionally piercing.
Kaphar’s cast is outstanding, and Holland and Ellis-Taylor deliver incredible performances that are, yes, very awards-worthy. But it’s John Earl Jelks, as the relatively more unknown quality, the former addict and before abusive father who still can’t arguably comprehend the full weight of the damage he’s caused, who is a revelation. And the scenes between him and Ellis-Taylor are just heart-wrenching. Jaime Ray Newman as Tarrell’s icy art representation Janine is also pretty terrific casting.
It’s perhaps reductive and (arguably) almost offensive to call it this year’s “Moonlight,” Barry Jenkins’ dazzling family drama, its own unique beast, but if it helps the film find the recognition and acclaim it so desperately deserves, then so be it; it’s that exemplary. That said, the way the unshowy films both persuasively evoke Roger Ebert’s cinemas as an empathy machine delivery system quote seems apt: they both radiate raw emotion. Perhaps a less contentious touchstone might be the emotionally lacerating films of Derek Cianfrance. He’s a lead producer on the film, and while Kaphar’s Black experience is obviously much different, the similar, authentic, and painfully true echoes of familial anguish that Cianfrance often explores feel appropriately simpatico.
Featuring an elegiac, plaintive, and melancholy score by Jherek Bischoff, reminiscent of the affecting works of Emile Mosseri (and we mean that as the highest compliment), “Exhibiting Forgiveness” has so many tools at its disposal to make this soulful, sophisticated drama soar, including beautifully crafted naturalistic cinematography by Lachlan Milne (“Minari”).
Kaphar is already an internationally regarded artist whose work is included in the collections of MoMa, the Whitney, and The Met, and he’s a MacArthur Fellowship award winner among many of his accolades. And yet, he resists the temptation that so many artists make—like Julian Schnabel, though those experiments have largely worked— when making the leap from the canvas to celluloid to get too lyrical, surreal, or experimental.
Kaphar’s film is almost doggedly grounded in the reality of the emotion, confronting and facing every scene rather than imbuing it with expressive treatment. The few occasional moments when he enters the dream-like are often more like a strange striking collision with reality rather than an escape into another world, and thus all the more effective.
An unquenchable art market is cross-examined too; the idea of black art consumed and absorbed into white spaces, fetishized and separated from their true intention is another theme that Kaphar touches upon in his gallerist scenes: the conflicted notion of selling art and being successful at it, but at what cost of to integrity.
Make no mistake, “Exhibiting Forgiveness” can be painful but rewardingly so; it’s complex, unresolved ending all the more honest and true. As the title suggests, perhaps forgiveness is just a presentational act, but not a feeling the anguished can truly abide. Regardless, this sophisticated drama is a triumph of humanism, filled with aching regret and dolor about the past but overflowing with love for what the future can still hold. [A+]
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