I forgive you.
Three words, simple and straight. But to say them—and mean them—can feel too much. Scars still ache. Memories still haunt. To say those words can feel like a mountain to climb, an ocean to swim. Sometimes, it can feel like death.
Tarrell has much to be thankful for. He’s husband to a talented, patient and loving wife. He’s father of a precocious little boy. He’s caretaker of some impressive artistic talents, and he’s used those talents to become respected and famous. He’s content; happy, even.
But sometimes Tarrell wakes in the dark hours, so terrified he can’t even breathe. Sometimes he remembers his childhood, filled with broken mirrors, broken promises, broken people.
His father looms over all this brokenness: La’Ron, the shattered root of it all. He’s not seen the man for 15 years, and that’s fine with him. Tarrell’s wife, Aisha, has never met him. Tarrell prays that his son never will.
But when he goes back to his old hometown to visit, and to take his mother back to his new one, she has a surprise: a visit from La’Ron.
“He trying!” Joyce tells Tarrell. “I need you to speak to him. I need you to talk to him. Please! He has changed!”
“He hasn’t changed!” Tarrell shoots back.
I forgive you.
Three words.
Three words Tarrell swore he’d never say to his father. Three words he swears he never will.
Let’s be clear: Tarrell would indeed have a lot to forgive. La’Ron made plenty of mistakes as both a husband and father. So one of the core questions at the heart of Exhibiting Forgiveness is a deceptively simple one: Has La’Ron changed?
La’Ron certainly believes he has. And so does Joyce—who, let’s be honest, has just as much to forgive.
La’Ron is a crack addict who’s been clean and sober for the last several months. He’s been leaning on faith to help carry him through (more on that below), and he’s doing his best to repair the relationships he shattered. His relationship with Tarrell is a doozy to try to patch. But he keeps trying. In big ways and small, he keeps trying.
Why? Because Joyce won’t let him stop, that’s why.
Tarrell pictures his mom as almost a living saint, and that’s not far from the truth. Joyce reminds La’Ron how often she took him back and bandaged him up; how often he told her that things were “going to be different,” and how often he broke that promise. But every time he came back after that broken promise, Joyce says “I bandaged you, and I take care of you like the Bible say I’m supposed to.” Her own wellspring of forgiveness is, seemingly, bottomless.
But that doesn’t mean that Joyce is some sort of passive patsy, weakly submitting to those injustices. In flashback, we see her upbraid La’Ron for how he treats young Tarrell, and she presciently warns him of what it will do to his relationship with his son.
Throughout it all, Tarrell’s wife, Aisha, does what she can to protect her family and help her husband. She tells Tarrell that he needs to deal with these lingering issues with his father. “It’s just gonna follow us home if we don’t deal with it here,” she says. “Some things can’t be worked out on canvas.”
If forgiveness forms the movie’s central pole, Christianity is the foundation into which that pole is cemented. For Joyce, the two are intimately related. “The Bible says [that] if you don’t forgive others of their past sins, then you can’t be forgiven,” Joyce tells Tarrell. “That’s the Bible, son!” She’s clearly a committed believer. And even as Tarrell preps to have her move closer to him, Joyce drags her feet because “my church is here.”
La’Ron, too, has apparently become a committed Christian. He carries his Bible everywhere. And in a moment of crisis, he fervently prays at Tarrell’s side. “If you have faith, God can do miracles,” he says at one point, and he talks about his own prayer closet. “I never stopped praying for you,” La’Ron tells Tarrell.
His turn toward faith may have a lot to do with his current residence. He’s living in someone’s basement right now, the owner being perhaps a pastor or faith-based counselor; and his “landlord” insists that La’Ron follow plenty of rules.
“I go to chapel every morning at six,” the landlord says. “You come with me. And if you don’t, you no longer have a place to stay. The church has recovery meetings every day. You have to go twice a week, or you no longer have a place to stay. Do you agree to follow my rules?”
La’Ron agrees, and he’s continued to follow those rules by the time Tarrell arrives—as he’s still living in the man’s basement.
We learn that La’Ron’s own father was also a pastor, and that he, too, had a difficult relationship with his son. After La’Ron broke a commandment, his dad said that he must “confess your sins in front of the congregation, [or] you not setting one foot inside my church.” La’Ron’s mother, whom La’Ron describes as a “living saint,” stood up for her son. “You don’t speak for God!” she said. (La’Ron describes another conversation between his parents, during La’Ron’s father called La’Ron a “heathen sinner,” and his mom responded, “Jesus is strong enough to save.”)
Both Joyce and La’Ron encourage Tarrell to forgive because God wants him to. But as Tarrell rejects that notion of forgiveness, he rejects God, too. He loves his mom and does his best to respect her deep beliefs at first. But in a moment of deep conflict, he begins to refer to the Almighty as “your God.” And as his mother talks about biblical forgiveness, Tarrell retells the story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac—giving it his own cynical spin.
Without giving too much away, Tarrell doesn’t stay in that God-hating space. But there’s no complete about-face here, either; no altar call to end the film. Tarrell’s spiritual walk—like those of many of ours—is a journey, and his own ultimate destination may be years, or decades, away.
We hear references to grace and miracles in a song. Someone tells Tarrell that “God is speaking” through his art. We hear a reference or two regarding how God erases our sins. “We have all sinned and fall short of the glory of God,” La’Ron intones at one point. Scads of references are made to prayer, and at one point Tarrell asks someone not to pray for him.
Tarrell and Aisha have a sensual moment as Aisha (a musician) works on a song. The two begin kissing, and as the moment grows more intimate, Aisha announces, “OK, I’m done [working].” The camera then cuts away.
We learn that La’Ron fathered Tarrell out of wedlock.
At one point, Tarrell asks Joyce why she left him with his father. “You knew what he was doing.” Most likely, that interaction refers to how hard La’Ron was making Tarrell work—but it’s possible that some might hear those words and come to another conclusion.
A convenience store is robbed near the beginning of the movie: The owner seems knocked unconscious during the initial assault, but a bystander pummels the would-be robber with a baseball bat. Thinking the robber is also unconscious, the bystander turns his back—only to be attacked in turn. Most of this violence is perpetrated off-camera (or captured by grainy surveillance footage), but the injuries the bystander suffers are severe, and we later see his bruised-and-bleeding back when he takes a shower.
We hear how La’Ron’s father whacked La’Ron in the head and left him unconscious on the ground. The father later threatened his wife and his son with a gun—an occurrence, La’Ron suggests, that was relatively common. (“You know how many times Daddy pulled a gun on us?” he says.)
Exhibiting Forgiveness initially obscures Tarrell’s painful childhood experiences. We see only flashes of images: a broken mirror, a bloody foot, a burning trashcan. But the movie does ultimately pull us back into Terrell’s past, bringing context to that fleeting, jarring imagery.
[Spoiler Warning] La’Ron forced young Tarrell—probably around 11 or 12 years old—to work “like a man” alongside him, mostly doing odd jobs and loading trash into the back of La’Ron’s old truck. One afternoon, Tarrell jumps from the truck bed and onto a piece of wood with a nail sticking straight up. The nail pierces Tarrell’s shoe and runs straight through the kid’s foot. But La’Ron barely lets the boy pause before the two are back at work again. We watch as Tarrell pushes a running lawnmower uphill, his shoe stained and filling with blood, as La’Ron pushes him to work faster.
That night (we learn), Joyce tells La’Ron that he needs to leave; his treatment of Tarrell is inexcusable. “You’re not making him into a man,” she says. “You’re breaking him. And he’s going to hate you for it.” The camera soon switches to Tarrell in his room—awake and terrified—as he hears his parents arguing. Soon there’s a crash, and Tarrell runs out to find his mom, knocked out, a broken mirror lying nearby.
Elsewhere, someone throws and breaks a coffee cup. A character dies. Tarrell—in the throes of a night terror—knocks a hole through a wall, terrifying his wife and son. And he confesses that, sometimes when his own little boy messes up, he hears La’Ron’s voice inside his head telling him how he should respond. “That scares me,” Tarrell says.
We hear about 20 uses of the f-word and nearly as many of the s-word. “A–,” “d–n,” “p-ss” and the n-word are all heard, too. God’s name is misused about 10 times, once with the word “d–n.”
La’Ron talks about how he first became a crack addict. He talks about how his niece was smoking the stuff, ultimately setting the family house on fire. After they helped his brother and wife into a new house, La’Ron caught his niece with a crackpipe—still unwilling and unable to give up the habit. “You don’t understand,” she told La’Ron. “You never hit this before.”
So La’Ron ultimately did try it. And from that moment on, “all I could think about was my next score.” He worked harder than anyone he knew to earn enough money to pay for crack. Indeed, that’s why he forced Tarrell to work so hard, too: One day, Tarrell begged La’Ron to finally quit work for the day—to come home and see how proud mama would be of how much money they made.
“This is my money, you hear me?” La’Ron tells Tarrell, warning him not to tell Joyce about any of it. Soon thereafter, he’s giving a street dealer all the cash they earned that day for drugs.
Characters smoke cigarettes. An art exhibit depicts people drinking alcohol.
A big part of La’Ron’s work consists of cleaning up animal excrement—shoveling most of it into the back of his pickup. We see him and Tarrell dig through plenty of it. When Tarrell asks if they might just go home after a full day’s work, La’Ron talks about how they don’t get time off. “The world don’t give a s— about us,” he says, making a reference to the racism he believes is all around them.
To forgive would seem—for those who’ve never truly needed to forgive—such a simple thing. We understand that, as La’Ron would say, we all “fall short of the glory of God.” We know that God has forgiven us. So it shouldn’t be hard to turn around and forgive someone else for something, right? Forgive someone for cutting you off in traffic; forgive someone for giving you an undeserved failing grade; forgive someone for being cranky one night when you really wanted to talk.
But sometimes, the word forgiveness feels uncomfortably like another, very different word: unfair.
When the wounds go deep, when the hurts still sting decades later, when we know that we were unjustly and perhaps horrifically treated, to forgive seems insane. We deserve justice. We deserve retribution. To stew and fume and hate feels good, in a strange sort of way, because it feels so justified. We know that our enemies deserve punishment. So we punish them in, sometimes, the only way we can. We lash out. We ignore. We cut them off completely. We refuse to be hurt by them ever again.
And yet all the anger and all the silence and all that stewing, burbling hate comes with a cost, too. We think we’re hurting someone else. And maybe we are. But maybe, in a moment of clarity, we understand that the person we’re hurting most is … ourself.
In Exhibiting Forgiveness, we feel Tarrell’s hurt. We see the scars. We know the pain. La’Ron was a terrible husband, a terrible father. You can’t let that go … can you?
But we see the cost of 15 years of bitterness, too. “It’s not good to live with all that inside you,” someone tells him. “You need to forgive so God can take that away.”
Exhibiting Forgiveness offers no easy assurances, no simple answers. Forgiveness, like relationship, is hard. And this movie, perhaps like life itself, demands that we bring our own meaning to its cinematic canvas. We watch this small origami of existence unfold and reveal and wrinkle and smooth out. And we know that as the credits roll, the story’s not done. The lives we see fold and fold again, into new shapes, new joys, new sorrows.
Like the story it tells, Exhibiting Forgiveness comes with its own challenges. The profanity is where this movie earns its R-rating. The subject matter is certainly not for children, either. And while the violence isn’t particularly graphic, it can be deeply troubling.
But for all its difficulties, Exhibiting Forgiveness examines the complexities of pain and faith, of messy families and messier redemption, with sincerity and clarity. It reminds us that relationships are hard—and that our relationship with our own Savior, our own Creator, can come with its own hardships. When we are asked to live as Christ lived, to forgive as Christ forgave, that’s not just a matter of stringing together a handful of words. But it reminds us that to do things our own way comes with a cost, too.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
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