Sundance Institute
MOVIE REVIEW
Exhibiting Forgiveness (2024)
It’s not so much that this movie has strange ideas about the healing power of art. It’s that it has strange ideas about the healing power of forgiveness. Here forgiveness is not a gift you give yourself. Instead it’s something other people have the right to, without apology or doing the work to set things right. This strange sense of entitlement is the hook on which hangs a difficult family history and how it has shaped an artist. So the choice of the word “exhibit” in the title is appropriate: it’s only a feeling of the real thing.
Tarrell (André Holland), his musician wife, Aisha (Andra Day), and their little boy, Jermaine (Daniel Berrier), live in a modernist dream house, full of bookshelves, pianos and tasteful carpeting. Aisha and Jermaine each have their own appropriately-sized drumsets, too. Tarrell is a painter with an enormous studio out back, and most of his painting are representative of his childhood in tough corners of New Jersey, where he was brought up by his mother, Joyce (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), and father, La’Ron (John Earl Jelks), before La’Ron disappeared into addiction. Despite the bucolic setting of his gorgeous home, an evidently successful career and a loving family, Tarrell has night terrors so bad he’s capable of punching holes in the walls, and Aisha is on her last good nerve. As Tarrell’s mental health begins to spiral, La’Ron gets a bad beating when he witnesses a liquor store robbery; and something in that incident motivates him to clean up his act for the first time in decades. And as a result of his newfound cleanliness and sobriety, La’Ron decides it’s time to reconnect with Tarrell.
Tarrell has no interest in La’Ron, but Joyce wants them to reconcile more than anything in the world. Ms. Ellis-Taylor gives a brave performance here of an incredibly needy woman, capable of manipulation so childish and pathetic that Tarrell can only acquiesce to her wishes in shock. He’s in the old neighborhood because of plans to have Joyce sell her house and move in with them, though Joyce has made no effort whatsoever to pack and throws attention-seeking fits whenever Tarrell tries to work. His painful memories are all right there in and around Joyce’s house, but writer-director Titus Kaphar, who also created Tarrell’s paintings, makes sure we get the point by showing the paintings in situ with young Tarrell (Ian Foreman) standing by them. This doesn’t so much make the point as club us around the head with it.
Mr. Holland has an impossible part as a man whose success is built on unhappiness, but who seems to think his art is somehow above, or separate from, his life. The extended flashbacks of La’Ron and young Tarrell tell us what the art shows, and choosing “Rodin” as the family surname is also a little much. As shown here at the Sundance Film Festival, Tarrell is not a man who has chosen to think about his life, so we’re meant to believe his artistic talent is somehow a subconscious accident? Considering how the art world is famous for analyzing everything to death, this is unrealistic and also very silly. It would have been so much more powerful if Mr. Kaphar had chosen to give Tarrell agency over his artistic decisions. As it is, the movie feels as forced as the argument scenes between Mr. Holland and Mr. Jenks, through no fault of the actors. “Exhibiting Forgiveness” wants our praise, but it hasn’t done the work.
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