Life Doesn’t Frighten Me: An Exhibiting Forgiveness Review
It’s difficult to see the bigger picture from inside of the frame. Exhibiting Forgiveness, Titus Kaphar’s brilliant work of difficult truths creates a cutout of shared emotional burdens for audiences to insert themselves into— it pulls back the rug on all of the familial things we thought we healed from, reminding us that healing isn’t linear. Exhibiting Forgiveness is a thoughtfully scripted and delicately executed vision of shared emotional experiences where the through line runs across a range of emotions that make perfect sense and no sense simultaneously.
“Some things can’t be worked out on canvas.”
Tarrell (André Holland) is father to Jermaine (Daniel Michael Barriere) and husband to Aisha (Andra Day) in a way that husband and father hadn’t been taught to him by his father La’Ron (John Earl Jelks). And with as much love as there is between him and his mother Joyce (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), she also didn’t provide much of an example for the life he creates for himself, against all odds. The comfort of his carefully curated life is upended when his well-intended mother attempts to jumpstart a journey to reconciliation between father and son that neither is prepared for.
Tarrell is pressured to forgive moments of his and his father’s shared past without repentance, while the burden of the memories he both wants to let go of and needs to remember were real, sits on his chest night after night, inhibiting his breath.
This film explores themes of grief repressed versus grief revealed, love versus fear, forgiveness, anger, generational trauma, emotional boundaries, as well as drug abuse, domestic violence, nurtured violence, casual cultural abuse masked with humor, and how trauma weighs against the attempted lift of creative expression. It uses abstract imagery to fuse bitter memories with the beautifully painted expressions that derive from his inability to shake the past.
Tarrell struggles with his mother’s faith, and aside from explicitly stated qualms with his inability to reconcile religion and relationship, Christian symbolism is embedded in the picture in moments of bold subtlety. This can be seen in the junkyard scene when a young Tarrell (Ian Foreman) jumps off of the flatbed of his father’s truck and onto a rusty nail. The nail in his foot, the expressed agony, and subsequently being forsaken by his father who thought ignoring the medical emergency was somehow a favor to his child’s masculinity— the entire scene feels reminiscent of the crucifixion of Christ. Similarly, the dialogue between Tarrell and Joyce where he recalls the story of God asking Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, his only son— the parallel drawn between God (who seems reflective of JaRon) requiring a sacrifice from Abraham (reflective of Tarrell), and that sacrifice being his only son, Isaac (reflective of Jermaine) illustrates the layers of distrust for what feels required from both God and JaRon.
Holland is a vision in this layered depiction of masculinity that is so carefully constructed around the presence of the dehumanizing experience that is the shared truth of many black men. It’s a depiction of masculinity that understands the presence of pain in joy. Day is a scaffolding of grounded womanness, whose ethereal voice creates transcendence wherever it’s embedded. Ellis-Taylor’s characterization of stuck is a cautionary tale of faith without works, coupled with that of Jelks’ embodiment of hopeless and helpless. Foreman tugs at the audience's heartstrings with an incredibly emotional performance that is the antithesis of Barriere’s depiction of Black boy joy.
Exhibiting Forgiveness creates a roadmap for navigating the difficult truths of Black manhood while nodding ever so lovingly at the Black woman as the flawed mothers, fortified wives, lovers, and fighters that they are— while also acknowledging some of the many ways they die for the sins of (their) men.
