Despite boasting one of the cringier on-the-nose titles of the year, one that on its face would seem to promise overt sentimentality, painter and installation artist Titus Kaphar’s feature film debut, Exhibiting Forgiveness, is a mercifully saccharine-free affair, thorny and unsettled in the way most of our intimate and binding relationships are. As a visual artist, Kaphar is known for his conceptual bent; The Vesper Project is likely his most well-known work to wider audiences, though it’s the Redaction project he completed with poet Reginald Dwayne Betts that reflects not just some of the artist’s most compelling creations, but his willingness to merge and tangle form (as well as delivering a profoundly moving document of blackout poetry, a form usually reserved for the realm of gimmickry). But with Exhibiting Forgiveness, which takes inspiration, or at least impression, from autobiography, Kaphar has delivered a work of art more intimate in nature, less concerned with a zoomed-out view of Black American experience, history, and representation, and more interested in surveying one man’s process of art and actualization.
That man is Tarrell (André Holland, giving a lightning-strike performance), a successful Black artist who as the film opens is working on a new exhibition for agent Janine (Jamie Ray Newman). Tarrell is openly uncomfortable with the world of high art, but feels compelled toward this latest show: he implies the money will allow his wife Aisha (Andra Day), a singer, to have “her turn,” but there’s the sense that his latest pieces, which we sees in various stages of development while he works in his studio, hold more considerable sway over his mind than he is letting on. We’re also immediately enlightened to Tarrell’s sleeping struggles, suggested (and then confirmed) to be the result of some lingering trauma, as well as his commitment to family, calmly sketched in early scenes suffused with images of gentle domesticity with AIsha and his young son Jermaine.
The narrative arc that eventually unfurls (and explains said trauma) finds Tarrell contending with the memory and materiality of his father La’Ron (John Earl Jelks), suddenly reentering his life after 15 years’ absence at the behest of Tarrell’s mother Joyce (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), much to her son’s anger and dismay. La’Ron has been clean for six months, but that matters very little to Tarrell, who is still haunted by the ghosts of his father’s crack addiction, which only heightened the physical and emotional abuse he inflicted on his young son in the name of toughening him up in order to meet a cruel waiting world. In the present, the film settles into a productive seesaw rhythm, with Tarrell giving and reclaiming inches of intimacy, his adult mind at once curious at the present state of a man he remembers as a monster while also hesitant to leave any room in himself for even the potential of grace to bloom. But what of the fallout our endured fallouts inflict?
If this all sounds like saccharine-soaked material ripe for easy drama and emotional manipulation, Kaphar’s visual instincts shut down any such reading quickly. That doesn’t mean the threat doesn’t arise in moments: Aisha telling her husband early in the film that “some things can’t be worked out on a canvas” is a little too self-conscious for comfort, but it’s a line that thankfully doesn’t reflect the films’ governing tenor. Instead, Kaphar proves patient and careful with his compositions, building profound power into simple images: a beaten, broken man’s grizzled beard dribbling down onto hands paralyzed with pain; the physical process of a trip to grandma’s conveyed through a series of near-static images that sequence like canvases in an exhibit. And like the paintings we watch Tarrell create on screen — which are actual works produced by Kaphar that were exhibited at the Gagosian gallery in Beverly Hills from September 13 to November 2, 2024, during which time the film was released into theaters — Kaphar’s frames burst with color, all sense of haunting barely hidden beneath bright saturations, depictions of domesticity and everyday toil guarding darker secrets.
But what’s most moving in Exhibiting Forgiveness is Kaphar’s willingness to let seams show, in multiple ways. There’s a clear materiality that remains at play throughout, with the film’s studio scenes likewise lending viewers a sense of seeking peace, the disorder of Tarrell’s emotional turmoil soothed by the scratching of brush on canvas, the dimensionality of glooped paint on the brick rectangles of a home’s foundation, the erasure of color as an articulation of absence — in other words, the evolution of both art and life in real-time. There’s a tonal and aesthetic cohesion in these scenes in particular that feels far richer and more mature than feature debuts are typically able to capture, and Kaphar’s ability to construct a tactile cinema is matched by a sophisticated approach to psychology. He understands the malleability of familial inheritance, the fact that grace is always prayer and never promise, and, most importantly, that real resolution is almost always messy and melancholy. Kaphar’s debut is a work blessedly untainted by the flattened emotional palette so typically employed in dramatic narrative cinema, and one that also asserts its essential, nuanced understanding of film as a visual language. There’s nothing to forgive here.
DIRECTOR: Titus Kaphar; CAST: André Holland, John Earl Jelks, Andra Day, Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor; DISTRIBUTOR: Roadside Attractions; IN THEATERS: October 18; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 57 min.
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