Exhibiting Forgiveness

dir: Titus Kaphar

2024

This is a tough watch. Families, huh?

They fuck you up, your mum and dad, they don’t mean to but they do.

I’m not going to quote the rest of the Philip Larkin poem, but it’s eternally relevant, yeah, in terms of this being the verse.

I had lovely parents, don’t get me wrong. I was very lucky in that, or should I say I was clearly very entitled to be born to such wonderful people (I somehow earned that honour). And yet I can watch a film like this, about a monster parent trying to reconcile with their adult child, and feel utterly torn in twain.

Your sympathies may be pulled, must be, in the direction of Tarrell (the great André Holland), a man who works as an artist, painting big canvasses, trying to be a loving father to his young son Jermaine and supportive partner to his wife Aisha (Andra Day) who is an artist herself. His art conceals, but not for very long, a tension between a childhood he yearns for and the one he actually had. In the present, and in parallel to Tarrell’s struggles, we see a seemingly homeless guy do his strange homeless things before copping a severe beating. He hobbles to someone who might help him, who does, only until his wife finds out and starts yelling at the visitor as to where all her rings are at. Obviously bad blood there. Best not to ask.

The man is funnelled towards the basement of a hard man who imposes strictures upon this chap, which if they aren’t obeyed, will see him homeless again.

But this man, La’Ron (John Earl Jelks), is transformed. He is clean for the first time in a long time, washed and shaven. As such it’s time for him to demand forgiveness from those he has wronged.

Forgiveness is a complicated business. Whatever this man, La’Ron did to his family, to his son Tarrell, and to his wife Joyce (the great Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), it has left Tarrell in such a state that he wakes up screaming from his dreams, fighting off an attacker, destroying things around him in his terror. He is frequently terrified that he will visit similar terrors upon his young son.

He paints his scenes of suburban stability, but then annihilates or paints over or extracts the figures within. These scenes don’t underline his thinking for us, just his agitation, his need to exorcise his terrors through his art. So maybe, as is painfully referenced later on in the film, our interpretation doesn’t match the artist’s approach, and again reflects more about us than him.

The attempt at reconciliation, at forgiveness, in the very Christian sense, is brought about by Tarrell’s mother, who forces the matter because she thinks it’s the right thing to do. Almost everyone tells Tarrell it’s the right thing to do.

And, for most of the film, Tarrell is entirely resistant to this line of thinking. As well he should be. The mother has her own reasons for foisting this kind of thinking on her son, and none of it has anything to do with Tarrell’s wellbeing.

How are we meant to feel about La’Ron, this man who begs for forgiveness, when we can see how traumatised Tarrell is, when we don’t hear and see the man’s abuses until very late in the flick? I think we’d bring our own baggage, our own damage on something like that.

You cannot say to people how they should feel about their abusers. I don’t think anyone has that right, even the people, sometimes, who’ve suffered at that same person’s hands. Joyce (the mum) invokes what is required of Christians, in that they must forgive in order to be forgiven themselves. La’Ron tells Tarrell that he has to forgive him, in the same sentence as he takes credit for Tarrell’s success in life, having benefited from the lessons his father taught him through his abuses.

Does it matter to us as the audience that La’Ron was deep in his crack addiction at the time? La’Ron gives us his story as to how he came to be addicted to crack, and how he kept it together for a good long while before things fell apart, and how hard he had to work to keep his addiction hidden. That’s another way of saying “it wasn’t me, it was someone else”. I’m not that person any more. No matter how awful what “he” did, I’m not like that anymore. You can’t keep blaming me for what that other guy did.

Even giving him credit for staying sober for however long, c’mon man, it’s a bullshit dodge. You’re literally the same person, you just don’t want to acknowledge it. You feel like if you’re forgiven, it makes it all okay. You want to be forgiven not for the overall benefit of your victims, but for yourself.

Such selfish thinking, but I’ll be damned if I don’t sympathise with him anyway. I can’t help but have sympathy for fuckups. I can have extra sympathy when they stay sober for a length of time and improve their circumstances in life and try to make amends.

Doesn’t obligate us to agree with them, though. Seeing as this involves the experiences of African-American characters, and, I’m guessing, this reflects the experiences of the director himself, who happens to be an artist, whose paintings we see in the film, there are probably many nuances I have missed, not being African-American. It’s deeply rooted in its place and time, but it’s not like I can grasp every single thing. When we see a representation of Tarrell as a boy working with his father, being constantly screamed at and belittled, resulting in a terrible injury that the father chooses to ignore, well, I am in two minds about those scenes. I not only feel horrible for the young Tarrell, and the older Tarrell, but I even worse for that young boy playing him. No-one deserves to be screamed at like that, not even actors.

And when we find out that all this backbreaking, horrible “work” is solely for La’Ron to earn enough money for his next hit of crack, well, am I missing something? Are we meant to see something, even if it’s only a fraction, of this as a positive experience? A desperate man, with no education in the throes of addiction doing everything he can, including abusing his son, in order to keep his head above water?

It’s hard for me to take any positives from any of that, however much I might sympathise with La’Ron. Tarrell is the one spinning out of control, who is scared, and who is scaring his family.

Adding to that, he finds out, when we find out, why his mother tried to speedily facilitate a reconciliation, and why she’s been deliberately going slow when it comes to packing up her house and moving in with her son, at his instigation. And that creates even more sorrow for everyone to deal with.

I don’t want to make this film sound like a joyless drag, because it’s not about the miseries inflicted; it’s almost literally about the art that comes out of this “stuff of life”. There are parts that are hard to watch, and there are some scenes that felt like they went on a bit long for no reason.

None of that applies to any scenes with Andre Holland, who cannot do any wrong in my eyes. In this role he brings up so many complex facets of a contemporary African-American man struggling with trauma, struggling with himself, his fears about himself, his place in the world, both the ‘real’ world and the unholy art world, desperately remaining vulnerable, and putting in for me what was genuinely one of the greater performances of last year, no matter how long Adrien Brody’s speech went at the Oscars: he won for the most acting, whereas Holland here gives a masterclass in quality acting.

A lot of men, a lot of directors would have defaulted to rage: there is a comfort with just allowing a tortured male character only display that one emotion because, apparently, that’s the one we’re all comfortable with. Anything else, like deep sorrow, or wanting to maintain tenderness towards those around him, or an even deeper empathy for the boy he was, is an emotional minefield. I feel, on the most part, that the film manages to dance delicately through that minefield.

And it’s not one that devolves into expected clichés, or one that simplifies the complexity of what’s being asked for. It raises, in many ways, and in many guises, what it means to forgive, what it means for the person being asked, the person who did the unforgivable.

Maybe there are some things that can’t be forgiven, but at the very least it can seem like if Tarrell could manage to forgive La’Ron, he could manage to forgive his younger self for the guilt his still carries of not being able to protect himself or his mother. At the very least he has to do something so he can sleep at night.

This is a powerful film, powerfully acted (perhaps too powerfully, at times), with no easy answers, but mostly some decent performances. It hurt to watch, but I hope I am the better for it.

8 times forgiveness is for the one forgiving, not for those who wound us out of 10

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“I put it on canvas, so I can hold it by the throat.” - Exhibiting Forgiveness