SUNDANCE24 REVIEW: Exhibiting Forgiveness [2024]

Rating: R | Runtime: 117 minutes
Release Date: October 18th, 2024 (USA)
Studio: Roadside Attractions
Director(s): Titus Kaphar
Writer(s): Titus Kaphar

He gave me you, Tarrell.

Haunted by the traumatic memories of his childhood, a painter (André Holland’s Tarrell) begins the journey to exorcize those demons through his art. Giant canvases are suddenly filled with color to depict the houses and innocence that were left to decay in the past. He gives them form at a moment when he’s ready to officially leave it behind (if his nightmares ever let that be a possibility) by moving his mother (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor’s Joyce) out of the old neighborhood only to discover it isn’t quite ready to let him go.

Born from an art exhibit of the same name, Titus Kaphar’s Exhibiting Forgiveness serves as a means to process his own emotions and to supply the audience room to acknowledge theirs. He explains that the memories led to writing which led to paintings and then a script. Kaphar tried the documentary route first before finding the unfiltered truth too raw to deliver to the world, so he packaged his story within fiction instead as a way to be vulnerable without being fully naked. Like the canvases themselves, the film becomes a window into his pain and catharsis without sacrificing the distance needed to feel safe or the ability to let the message transcend any specific details.

What Tarrell endured is not therefore the point. The point is that he was forced to endure it. How did that shape who he became? How does fearing its presence within dictate his actions with a wife (Andra Day’s Aisha) and son of his own? Is putting it out into the world as painted vignettes enough to remove the suffering from his mind or might it allow it to rise and fester? And, of course, where’s the line when that anguish you seek to escape becomes a means towards money and/or a false familiarity from outsiders exploiting it for a bought seat at the table of genius? How does someone traverse these nuanced and triggering complexities?

What’s great about Kaphar’s work is that he never flattens the dynamics at play. Yes, Tarrell is our protagonist and must decide what to do when his desire to heal is complicated by the return of his abusive, drug-addict father La’Ronn (a scene-stealing John Earl Jelks), but he doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Just because he doesn’t believe it doesn’t mean La’Ronn hasn’t changed. Nor must Joyce refuse to forgive him just because Tarrell won’t. One person’s feelings shouldn’t cancel another’s or demand a binary result coerced from guilt. Every story has many valid perspectives—even if acknowledging that truth invalidates your hope for reconciliation.

Because forgiveness isn’t owed. It’s earned. And earning it doesn’t mean you’re entitled to a redo. Too often religion and society demand that peace be made reliant upon the victims making room for their aggressors rather than the aggressors working to cease their aggression regardless of whether doing so includes them in the result. This is an important distinction that can ruin the authenticity of a story if it isn’t made. Because trauma doesn’t just disappear. A happy ending isn’t solely about living happily ever after together as much as it is being able to live apart with a shared recognition that excuses (justified or not) can never erase trauma’s impact.

It may seem simple, but there’s so much power in letting that duality exist on-screen. Just because Exhibiting Forgiveness is immaculately constructed with devastatingly honest performances (Holland and Ellis-Taylor are amazing) doesn’t mean the drama it depicts isn’t messy and contradictory and heartbreaking in its characters’ needs to do what’s best for them despite not being what the rest hope. That’s where the difference between effective and transcendent lies—a filmmaker putting truth ahead of convenience in a way that allows the characters to accept the past without fear or denial. It happened and it mattered, but it’s no longer in control.