Film Review: “Exhibiting Forgiveness” is intimate, raw and hopeful

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Director: Titus Khapar
Writer: Titus Khapar
Stars: André Holland, Andra Day, John Earl Jelks

Summary: A black artist on the path to success is derailed by an unexpected visit from his estranged father, a recovering addict desperate to reconcile. Together they fight and learn that forgetting may be more challenging than forgiving.

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“I did it to you like my daddy did it to me.” -La’Ron Rodin

Debut film from artist/filmmaker Titus Khapar Show forgiveness asks why we forgive those in our lives who have caused us harm and reverberating trauma. Titus Khapar comes to the answer that we often do it not for the perpetrator, but to close a chapter so we can move on. Show forgiveness is a complex and layered piece of cinema that points to how religion can both hurt and heal in black communities, highlighting that the search for forgiveness requires more than a partial apology to be authentic.

André Holland, in a truly astonishing performance, plays Tarrell Rodin, a successful visual artist who lives with his singer-songwriter wife Aisha (Andra Day) and young son Jermaine (Daniel Berrier). Tarrell is a gentle husband as well as an involved and loving father. He lives just hours from his hardscrabble life in impoverished New Jersey, where he grew up. Tarrell may have escaped the physical reality of his childhood with his drug-addicted father La’Ron (John Earl Jelks), but the psychological scars are omnipresent in his nightmares and form the basis for much of his art. Tarrell struggles to exorcise the ghosts of his past. The final tie he thinks he can break is to bring his mother, Joyce (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), closer to his family and out of New Jersey “because sons take care of their mothers.” To do so, he must return to the neighborhood where he grew up – a space filled with La’Ron, both figuratively and literally, as he shows up at Joyce’s invitation, hoping to find a new connection with his son and his grandchild (that…he’s never met).

La’Ron is recently clean after years of crack and alcohol abuse. He has “rediscovered” the Bible and promises Tarrell that he is a changed man. Joyce strongly pushes for a reconciliation, but Tarrell refuses to accept La’Ron’s presence or listen to him. Only when his stepbrother Quentin (Matthew Elam) tells him that Tarrell has to do it for Joyce and not La’Ron does he agree to spend time with him.

Tarrell films La’Ron as he “interviews” him about what brought him to the point of addiction and what he believes warrants being allowed back into Tarrell’s or Joyce’s life. La’Ron was the son of a crazy preacher who used violence against his own family and justified it as divinity. After telling Tarrell a horrific story about his grandfather putting a gun to his grandmother’s head when La’Ron brought Tarrell and Joyce to visit shortly after his birth, he ends the story by saying, “He was a good one.” Man.” Tarrell rejects La’Ron’s interpretation of “good” because no “good” man would beat his wife or son in the name of the Bible or for any other reason. “He taught me about hard work, I taught you about hard work. And look at you. “You’re a success,” is essentially La’Ron’s reasoning. When Tarrell rejects La’Ron’s self-serving rewrite of the narrative, La’Ron loses his temper and throws a cup at the wall. “There’s the man I know,” Tarrell says and leaves.

Tarrell is burdened with such intense resentment and righteous anger over the post-traumatic stress disorder his upbringing has instilled in him that he cannot understand why Joyce wants him to forgive La’Ron so much. Khapar uses a flashback technique and Tarrell’s paintings (which are Khapar’s paintings) to illustrate La’Ron’s enormity as a father trapped in addiction. La’Ron was merciless to both Tarrell and Joyce – his only focus was on the next score and making Tarrell and himself work themselves to the bone to get it. Tarrell misses that Joyce may need his forgiveness for La’Ron in part because he forgives her for not leaving him sooner, and so he will learn that he must practice forgiveness in order to be good with God.

Tarrell’s mental state begins to deteriorate further as he loses his touchstones and the only person who constantly stays near him is La’Ron. As patient as she has been with Tarrell’s broken psyche, Aisha tells him that he needs to find a way to pull himself together because he is starting to scare Jermaine with the intensity of his panic attacks and the way they manifest in blind violence (Tarrell punches holes in walls). ). If Tarrell doesn’t face up to the harm he’s done, he’s bound to repeat it, no matter how much he consciously suppresses his anger.

Tarrell’s child self, played by Ian Foreman, takes him back in time by pushing his paintings like a magical portal into a primal hell in front of the houses in Orange, New Jersey. While this style can be construed as a bit self-indulgent, it is important to remember that Titus Khapar is a visual artist who has used his art, and particularly figure erasure, in his work to explore how the white gaze has cut black people out of history. Ian Foreman’s Tarrell tells the adult Tarrell not to return to the house on Gordon Street, but Tarrell never left.

Titus Khapar also points out that the personal and political artworks of Black artists and POC artists still rely on the “gaze” and patronage of rich white people. His agent Janine (Jamie Ray Newman) practically drools over the paintings he made of dollar signs at the beginning of the film. She forces him to go to a new exhibition just a few weeks after the last one. Tarrell has no time to “be” after major upheavals in his personal life. Like La’Ron, Tarrell has learned that in order to be seen as valuable, he must be an exemplary worker in front of white people.

Show forgiveness The film stumbles a bit in the dialogue, some of it seems cliched – but it doesn’t stumble over its intentions or the acting. André Holland delivers an outstanding performance, clearly learning the basics of drawing and painting, so the brushstrokes he puts on the canvas blend seamlessly with Khapar’s style. Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor rarely misses her role as a performer, and that too Show forgiveness Her Joyce is both resilient and ashamed. What ties it all together is John Earl Jelks as the merciless, pitiful and self-pitying La’Ron. The interactions he has with Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Ian Foreman and André Holland are electrifying. He may be clean, but he will never realize what he did.

Andra Day as Aisha can once again demonstrate her outstanding talent as a singer by recording the song “Bricks”, which forms the thematic basis for it Show forgiveness. Written by Jherek Bischoff and Cassandra Battie and sung by Day, the song is a poetic encapsulation of the struggle that Tarrell goes through and the struggle that Joyce and Aisha act as support networks. The often unacknowledged burden of black women to expose the destructive behavior of black men.

Show forgiveness It is about finding a way forward by acknowledging the damage of the past and understanding the context from which it arose. Tarrell tells his father, “You took on the past and I forgive you. But the future is mine.” Tarrell doesn’t forgive La’Ron because he fundamentally deserves to be forgiven, he doesn’t – he forgives him so he can stop the damaging cycle of harm and end the fear, that he could become the worst of La’Ron.

Show forgiveness is intimate, raw and hopeful. Tarrell takes control of his story and his art. Titus Khapar actually shifts perspectives by honoring the work Black men and women are doing to acknowledge the past and its influence on them and move forward toward a future of their own making.

Grade: A-