Director: Titus Khapar
Writer: Titus Khapar
Stars: André Holland, Andra Day, John Earl Jelks
Synopsis: 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 struggle and learn that forgetting might be a greater challenge than forgiving.
“I did you like my Daddy did me.” -La’Ron Rodin
Artist/filmmaker Titus Khapar’s debut feature Exhibiting Forgiveness asks why we forgive those in our lives who have caused us harm and reverberating trauma. Titus Khapar lands on the answer that we often don’t do it for the perpetrator, but for the sake of closing a chapter so we can move on. Exhibiting Forgiveness is a complex and layered piece of cinema that points to how religion in Black communities can both hurt and heal and highlights how the search for forgiveness requires more than a partial apology to be authentic.
André Holland, in a genuinely astonishing performance, plays Tarrell Rodin a successful visual artist living with his singer songwriter wife Aisha (Andra Day) and his young son Jermaine (Daniel Berrier). Tarrell is a gentle husband, as well as an involved and loving father. He lives hours away from his hardscrabble life in poverty-stricken New Jersey where he was brought up. Tarrell might have escaped the physical reality of his childhood with his abusive drug addicted father La’Ron (John Earl Jelks) but the psychological scars are ever present in his nightmares and form the basis of much of his art. Tarrell struggles with exorcising the ghosts of his past. The final link he feels he can break is to bring his mother Joyce (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) close to his family and out of New Jersey, “because sons look after their mothers”. To do this, he has to return to the neighborhood where he was raised – a space which is both figuratively and literally filled with La’Ron as he turns up at Joyce’s invitation hoping to forge a renewed connection with his son and his grandchild (who he has never met).
La’Ron is recently clean after years of crack and alcohol abuse. He has “rediscovered” the Bible and promises Tarrell he’s a different man. Joyce is pushing hard for reconciliation, but Tarrell refuses to countenance La’Ron’s presence or hear him out. It isn’t until his stepbrother Quentin (Matthew Elam) tells him that Tarrell needs to do it for Joyce’s sake not for La’Ron’s that he agrees 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 thinks justifies being let into Tarrell or Joyce’s life again. La’Ron was the son of an unhinged preacher who used violence on his own family and justified it as Godliness. After telling Tarrell an horrific story of his grandfather holding a gun to his grandmother’s head when La’Ron brought Tarrell and Joyce to visit him just after he was born, he ends it with saying “He was a good 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 justification. When Tarrell rejects La’Ron’s self-serving re-writing of the narrative, La’Ron loses his temper and throws a cup at the wall. “There’s the man I know,” Tarrell says, and he leaves.
Tarrell is burdened by such fierce resentment and justified anger at the PTSD his upbringing has wrought upon him that he can’t 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 monstrousness as a father caught in addiction. La’Ron was pitiless with both Tarrell and Joyce – his only focus being the next score and working Tarrell and himself to the bone to get it. Tarrell misses that perhaps why Joyce needs him to forgive La’Ron is so in part he will forgive her for not leaving him sooner, and so he will learn that he must practice forgiveness to be good with God.
Tarrell’s mental state begins to spiral further as he loses his touchstones and the only person who remains consistently around him is La’Ron. As patient as she has been with Tarrell’s broken psyche, Aisha tells him he must find a way to get his act together because he’s beginning to frighten Jermaine with the intensity of his panic attacks and how they manifest as blind violence (Tarrell punches holes in walls). If Tarrell doesn’t face up to the damage done, he is bound to repeat it no matter how hard he consciously represses his anger.
Tarrell’s child self played by Ian Foreman places him back into the past by wheeling his paintings in front of the houses in Orange New Jersey like a magical portal into a foundational hell. Although the device can be read as a little self-indulgent it is important to remember that Titus Khapar is a visual artist who has used his art and specifically erasing figures in his work to investigate how the white gaze has cut Black people out of history. Ian Foreman’s Tarrell tells the adult Tarrell not to go back inside the house on Gordon Street, but Tarrell has never left it.
Titus Khapar also points out how the personal and political artwork of Black artists and POC artists is still reliant on the “gaze” and patronage of rich white people. His agent Janine (Jamie Ray Newman) positively drools over the paintings he has been creating at the beginning of the film thinking in dollar signs. She’s forcing him back into a new exhibition mere weeks after the last. Tarrell doesn’t get time to ‘be’ after major upheavals in his personal life. Like La’Ron, Tarrell has learned that he must be an exemplary worker in front of White people to be considered of value.
Exhibiting Forgiveness stumbles a little in the dialogue with some of it coming across as cliché – but it doesn’t stumble in its intention or the acting. André Holland gives a towering performance and clearly learned the fundamentals of drawing and painting so the brushstrokes he places on canvas seamlessly blend with Khapar’s style. Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor rarely misses as a performer, and in Exhibiting Forgiveness her Joyce is both resilient and ashamed. What holds it all together is John Earl Jelks as the pitiless, pitiful, and self-pitying La’Ron. The interactions he has with Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, Ian Foreman, and André Holland are electric. He may be clean, but he will never come clean about what he did.
Andra Day as Aisha gets to once again display her sublime talent as a vocalist with Aisha recording the song “Bricks” which forms the thematic foundation for Exhibiting Forgiveness. Written by Jherek Bischoff and Cassandra Battie and performed by Day, the song is a poetic summary of the struggle Tarrell is going through and the one Joyce and Aisha have acted as support networks for. The often-unacknowledged burden of Black women unknotting the destructive behavior of Black men.
Exhibiting Forgiveness is about finding a way forward by acknowledging the harm of the past and understanding the context out of which it grew. Tarrell says to his father, “You took the past and I forgive you. But the future, that’s 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 pernicious loop of damage and put an end to the fear that he will become the worst of La’Ron.
Exhibiting Forgiveness is intimate, raw, and hopeful. Tarrell takes control of his story and his art. Titus Khapar does indeed shift the gaze by honoring the work Black men and women do to acknowledge the past and its hold upon them and move forward into a future of their own making.
