Exhibiting Forgiveness is the sort of film I don’t naturally gravitate towards. It’s about human feelings. It’s heartfelt. It holds out the possibility of positive change in a world stuck in a rut. It’s a Sundance movie.
Nothing wrong with Sundance movies but, as an entirely unfair generalisation, they do seem to exhibit a belief that putting emotion out there is interesting in itself, and that the sight of people having earnest conversations, shooting the breeze in a “naturalistic” way, is as dramatic as anything needs to be.
So, my stunted emotional hinterland laid bare, to Titus Kaphar’s first feature. He’s a painter who’s now made a film about a painter reconciling with his father. His 2016 short, The Jerome Project, was also about a painter setting out to reconcile with his father. There might be an autobiographical aspect to this movie, in other words.
It’s the story of a youngish guy who’s just cusping on big-time success as an artist. Tarrell is married to a musician wife, Aisha, and has a young son, Jermaine. They live a nice open-plan life and the extent of their worries is whose career is going to be prioritised. We get the sense that Aisha has put her life on hold a touch, so Tarrell can succeed, and that this is what the film is going to be about.
But then La’Ron turns up on the doorstep, hoping to reconnect with son Tarrell. In a little film-within-a-film we’ve seen La’Ron, one up from a street bum, hit rock bottom after taking a beating while trying to intervene in a convenience store hold-up. Having licked his wounds, cleaned up his act and started attending church, he would now like to re-establish contact with his son, and become some part of Tarrell’s family’s life.
In distressing flashbacks to Tarrell’s young life we see why this might not be as easy as just turning up and slotting back in. Extended scenes of Dad driving his young son unbelievably hard – telling the son that as a black man all he has to offer in a white world is the ability to work – bawling him out, goading him, ignoring his son’s bodily needs, before falling off the wagon and disappearing into a world of drug-assisted forgetting.
It’s the tough stuff that makes the movie. It provides proof of sorts that there is a potentially unbridgeable gap between father and son. Brought most obviously to a crescendo when Tarrell has an art exhibition and the father turns up, the spectre at the feast.
Maybe they aren’t so different beneath the surface though? How glib and what a cliché that would be if Kaphar didn’t do it so directly and unapologetically. His own art is on the walls in this film, and they’re like the film itself – folksy but with an edge that gives them cut-through. Pictures of suburban life with all the faces painted out messily, for instance.
The performances tap that edginess. André Holland and Ian Foreman are both excellent as the grown-up and young versions of Tarrell. Andra Day is literally the supportive actress as the supportive wife, Aisha. And Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor is the rock of ages as Tarrell’s wise, matronly, god-fearing mother. But it all hangs on John Earl Jelks as La’Ron. Playing both the older and decades younger versions of La’Ron, Jelks’s performance is one of real commitment. I see from a quick scan of the Awards section on the IMDb it this has failed to stir the souls of all the various organisations who hand out gongs.
Proving that while awards themselves are all very fine and good, the ones that go to actors are the ones most likely to get misdirected by juries who can’t tell the difference between a role and a performance.
Look at the speech La’Ron delivers towards the end, when he doesn’t seek so much to exonerate himself for his awfulness as a younger man, or apologise in any meaningful way. Instead he tries to pull something positive from all that neglect and abuse, like a man pulling a chestnut out of a fire. Jelks should get all the awards going for it. Instead nothing. Hey ho.
Exhibiting Forgiveness – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2026
