Exhibiting Forgiveness (Kaphar, 2024)

Exhibiting Forgiveness is the second film I’ve seen in as many days that purports to address autobiographical or personal themes close to the film’s auteur. Director Titus Kaphar says it “is a film rooted in lived experience—my experience.”

Are the criteria for evaluating such films different from those used to assess a commercial film with a more generic point of view? Should they be?

I think representation is important, and I am typically happy to see and review films about the lives of others. The best of such films may penetrate the skin of exotic strangeness that can trick us into thinking other cultures or races are unknowable. Less successful ones sometimes peddle in melodrama that would be called out as cliché were the subject matter cast as universal art rather than as personal memoir.

That which is universal in Exhibiting Forgiveness is … family trauma. The difficulty the main character, Tarrell, (André Holland), has in extending grace towards his father will be recognized and felt by those of all races. But the way that difficulty is manifested is idiomatic, particularly when Tarrell interacts with his mother, a woman whose ability to forgive both challenges and apparently repels him.

The concept of forgiveness is often misunderstood in American culture, particularly in those subcultures influenced by Christianity. One reason is that forgiveness is too frequently conflated with reconciliation. The former is, as best I understand it, an attitude toward one who has hurt or wronged you. The latter speaks about the existence of a relationship between parties. in the present moment. The implication too often made is that the latter is evidence, perhaps the only acceptable evidence, of the former. I related to the anguish of Tarrell in Exhibiting Forgiveness, but I found the film’s understanding of forgiveness a bit too conventional to convince me that this anguish was evidence of an internal as well as external struggle.

It’s worth noting, too, that the film begins with a brutal beating, caught on film, that can’t help but make us sympathetic to the victim. This is, of course, true of any narrative. Picking where to start will inevitably privilege those parts of the story arc over the ones that provide the background of the film’s situation. Is Exhibiting Forgiveness aware of this? Certainly Tarrell, like anyone who feels pressured to forgive by those in the present moment, seems frustrated by the unfairness of the moral expectations placed upon him. But those demands are made by others in the film. I am speaking of the film’s point of view, of the message Kaphar brings to the story and what he wants us to feel and understand about his avatar. If there was a perspective one was supposed to adopt about the material beyond that it was poignant and the character conflicted, I am not certain I caught it. The message appears to be, “this was my struggle,” not “here is what you can learn from it.”