‘Exhibiting Forgiveness’: Sundance Review

Dir/scr: Titus Kaphar. US. 2023. 117mins

A fractious father-son relationship splatters across the canvas of Exhibiting Forgiveness, a heartfelt drama about a painter who must finally confront his addict dad. Andre Holland brings immense feeling to his role as an artist haunted by childhood trauma, and writer-director Titus Kaphar’s semi-autobiographical feature debut is suffused with pain, anger and sorrow. The story is sometimes weighed down by an aggressive earnestness but, despite some overreaching and tonal inconsistencies, there is no denying the raw anguish that both Kaphar and his protagonist are trying to heal.

Andre Holland brings immense feeling to his role as an artist haunted by childhood trauma

Premiering in Sundance’s US Dramatic Competition, the film could be an attractive pickup for indie companies seeking a thoughtful exploration of how artists work through their issues in their art. Holland, whose 2022 short Shut Up And Paint was Oscar-shortlisted, is joined by Oscar-nominees Andra Day and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, helping to raise the profile of Exhibiting Forgiveness, and the project could also attract fans of Kaphar, who is himself an acclaimed painter. 

Tarrell (Holland) has just had a successful exhibition of his paintings, cementing his status as a rising star. He is happily married to musician Aisha (Day) and an attentive dad to their young son. One day he discovers that his estranged father La’Ron (John Earl Jelks) has returned, wanting to make amends after years of drug addiction which led to him abusing both Tarrell and his mother Joyce (Ellis-Taylor). Still battling panic attacks because of what he experienced as a boy, Tarrell wants nothing to do with the man, but La’Ron, who is sober and has embraced Christianity, insists he wants to make things right.

Kaphar has hinted that he based Exhibiting Forgiveness on personal events and there are times, as Tarrell confronts La’Ron, when it feels as if the writer-director is expressing his own fury through this painter character. The lack of polish in the dialogue — that ragged urgency — is so potent that it can give the film a fascinating directness but, more often, Kaphar’s lack of distance from the material hampers the emotional impact, keeping this potentially searing generational showdown from landing with full force.

Even so, Holland communicates the torment of someone who has built his art — and, by extension, his adult identity — on overcoming the cruelty he faced as a child. (Ian Foreman, who plays Tarrell as a boy in flashbacks, easily conveys the child’s misery at the hands of a monstrous father.) Because Tarrell has become celebrated as a painter, that childhood trauma clearly displayed in his work, there is a part of him that cannot forgive La’Ron; how can he see his dad as anything other than the villain?

Exhibiting Forgiveness makes plain that La’Ron was a terrible father, but Jelks’ desperate, empathetic turn makes the audience consider that perhaps this man really has changed. And if La’Ron has, is it cruel on Tarrell’s part not to at least try to meet him halfway?  For so long, he has viewed his father as the bogeyman — would his art lose its power if he reconciled with La’Ron? 

These intriguing questions captivate and the sharp ensemble brings them to life, with Ellis-Taylor particularly strong as a woman who, despite everything, never stopped loving her husband, even when he was in the throes of crack addiction. Terrell, on the other hand, prizes his anger at his dad, thinking that it is part of the reason his art resonates, which is why the willingness of others to give La’Ron another chance enrages him.

Kaphar’s nuanced tackling of the ways art and life intermingle plays out poignantly in Tarrell’s relationship with Aisha, two creative people who have learned to build a marriage around their shared passions. But the writer-director is less surefooted condemning clueless art patrons who just want pretty paintings for their bedrooms — Kaphar’s criticisms, no matter if they are based on actual experiences, come across as badly cliched. When Exhibiting Forgiveness goes for the grand gesture, it tends to stumble, but when it focuses on the confusion of an artist who has to decide what to do with the man he has long labelled his enemy — and, ironically, has become his muse — it paints a compelling portrait.