EXHIBITING FORGIVENESS (no distrib): The noted painter Titus Kaphar has made an impressive shift into scripted feature films. Although Exhibiting Forgiveness isn’t strictly speaking autobiographical, Kaphar’s protagonist Tarrell (Andre Holland) is a successful painter whose canvases resemble the filmmaker’s. Tarrell travels with his wife (Andra Day, playing a recording star) and young son to the town where he grew up, fulfilling a promise to himself that he’d move his mother Joyce (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) to a more upscale home near his family’s. When they arrive, though, Tarrell discovers that Joyce doesn’t want to move, but has instead brought him together with his estranged father La’Ron (John Earl Jelks). When Tarrell was growing up, La’Ron was an abusive crack addict, and he’s the last person on earth Tarrell wants to see. As the title suggests, Exhibiting Forgiveness is about a path to coming to terms with one’s past, but not in a facile way–flashbacks depict just how dreadful a father and husband La’Ron was, and Kaphar is more concerned with how Tarrell will go on with his life despite his pain than with his relationship with La’Ron. It’s not surprising in a film by a visual artist that the photography by Lachlan Milne is burnished and beautifully composed, but Kaphar’s eloquent screenwriting and direction of actors is striking. Holland gives a world-class performance as Tarrell, and the less well-known Jilks is superb as La’Ron, while Ellis-Taylor has some powerful moments late in the film. Exhibiting Forgiveness signals the arrival of an exciting talent, and in the future one hopes Kaphar will divide his time between film and his other arts.
SUNCOAST (Searchlight/Disney/Hulu – Feb. 9): Another slice of Sundance semi-autobiography, Laura Chinn’s film is sensitive but rather slick by film festival standards. It’s set very specifically in St Petersburg, Florida in 2005, and centers around Doris (a luminous Nico Parker), whose brother has reached the end stages of brain cancer and has been checked into a hospice. As it happens, this is the same hospice that houses Terri Schiavo, the subject of a real-life courtroom drama about the right to die. You might think that this storyline would be relevant to Suncoast‘s plot, but it’s simply a coincidence in the film, present because Chinn’s own brother spent his last days in Schiavo’s hospice. Suncoast concentrates on the rough relationship between Doris and her mother Kristine (Laura Linney), whose entire being is devoted to her dying son, with hardly anything left for her daughter. Doris, increasingly isolated, throws herself into making friends with the richer and more popular girls at her high school, helped by the convenient ability to turn her home into the local party house, since her mother is sleeping at the hospice. Despite what one may expect, the girls are mildly insensitive but utterly un-mean. Doris also makes the acquaintance of Paul (Woody Harrelson), who’s on the scene as a protester against Schiavo’s death, but whose position in the plot is strictly as Doris’s empathetic fairy godfather. Despite the true-life basis of Suncoast, Chinn’s script plays as predictable, with discoveries, fights and forgiveness arriving exactly on cue. Parker is an extremely promising young actress, and Linney deserves credit for never flinching at the ugly ways Krisitne treats her daughter. Without any deeper insights to offer, though, Suncoast is proficient without being memorable.
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