One of the first things we see in Sweetheart Deal, a Seattle-set documentary directed by Elisa Levine and the late Gabriel Miller, is a weathered man in a dust-brown newsboy cap throwing scraps of bread to the pigeons gathered at his feet. Suddenly, he scoops one up and cradles it snugly. “If you hold it right, they don’t struggle too much,” he says.
If one goes into Sweetheart Deal without knowing too much, the visual and sentiment might seem, for a time, like an apt, if faintly ominous, metaphor. On Aurora Avenue North in Seattle, the man, Laughn Elliott Doescher, was considered by some to be the strip’s de-facto mayor for several years. The worn-down camper van he lived in doubled as a ramshackle haven for many women making a living there through sex work, a profession from which the neighborhood has long been inextricable. We see his impact early, when a sex worker who calls herself Amy turns to him for help after she’s brutally assaulted by a client. In a job where safety is precarious, Doescher is the rare man around who seems to have those who turn to him’s best interests in mind. He has the power to snap the pigeon’s neck, but he gently strokes it instead.
Tammy in Sweetheart Deal.
Finally getting a theatrical release after some time on the festival circuit, Sweetheart Deal homes in on Amy and fellow sex workers Tammy, Kristine, and Sara, all of whom confide in Doescher both in times of serious need and when simply wanting some platonic, no-strings-attached companionship. He’ll offer a warm drink on a chilly night; he’ll hand over a card when a parent forgets a birthday.
Not the film’s primary focus, these women’s individual relationships with Doescher are conduits for larger portraits. Sharp-witted Kristine is a welder by trade who’s been in and out of sex work as a way to support an expensive drug habit. Tammy turns to sex work as a way to support her nonworking parents and a heroin addiction that can cost her anywhere from $200 to $300 a day. Sara, also struggling with addiction, has become estranged from her three children following an acrimonious divorce. Amy was once a sorority sister with a 4.0, a bright future, and stable parents whose addiction has set her life off track. She reminisces wistfully about the days when she had an apartment and found nightly pleasure in deciding what to cook for dinner.
These women’s realities are bleak, though not without some hope for brighter futures and the encouragement that comes from camaraderie. Miller and Levine are careful in their framing not to make a miserablist anti-sex-work movie; Sweetheart Deal is a humane portrait of women caught in a cycle they’re acutely aware isn’t easy to break out of. It’s difficult to quit hard drugs. It’s difficult to find work when you have a record. And if you do find a job, it’s difficult to stay in it when you’re also dealing with addiction.
Sara in Sweetheart Deal.
It eventually will emerge that Doescher is not the benevolent figure many see him as — something the local news media has made abundantly clear in recent years. (Sweetheart Deal was mostly shot between 2011 and 2017.) It’s a development the filmmakers, who’d thought their movie would largely be a work of street-life portraiture, didn’t see coming: “I definitely didn’t think it was going to have such a definite ending,” Levine has said. It’s a gut-wrenching twist that also underlines a message that had been more implicit by that point of the film: the criminalization of sex work harms more than it helps, making women who make a living from it especially vulnerable to advantage-taking people like Doescher.
Sweetheart Deal calls to mind another Seattle documentary, Mark Bell and Mary Ellen Mark’s Streetwise (1984), that trained its gaze on young people trying to get by on the streets for varying reasons. (Levine has explicitly cited the movie, which she saw in college, as a major influence.) Like Streetwise, Sweetheart Deal doesn’t offer easy answers; there’s potentially change-making value in the compassion it has for, and the seriousness with which it takes, women rarely afforded it. “By highlighting the resilience and struggles of the women in the film, we aim to bring people together to discuss solutions and understand what truly matters, beyond political affiliations,” Levine said in a recent conversation with the critic Sara Michelle Fetters. “Ultimately, we believe the film speaks to everyone and offers a chance for collective reflection and dialogue.”
André Holland and Andra Day in Exhibiting Forgiveness.
For Tarrell (André Holland), the ultra-successful painter protagonist of artist Titus Kaphar’s feature-directing debut Exhibiting Forgiveness, going home reopens old wounds that have only recently begun scarring over. He’s in town with his son and wife, Aisha (Andra Day), to help his mother, Joyce (a wonderful Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), finish up packing so that she can move into a new house he’s bought her. The trip will go on longer than expected, though: Joyce hasn’t filled a single box, and only a few hours into Tarrell’s arrival does his 15-years-estranged father, La’Ron (John Earl Jelks), appear, hoping to make amends.
The relationship is, to say the least, fraught: among Exhibiting Forgiveness’ first images are from a dream Tarrell has about La’Ron that will cause him to wake up screaming, ready for a fight. The more we learn about the father-son relationship, the more we understand why. Growing up, La’Ron was addicted to crack — something with which he’s still struggling — and its effects created an atmosphere of restless intensity and fear that sometimes tipped into physical abuse. Exhibiting Forgiveness ponders how possible it is to forgive someone responsible for much of your life’s pain; what’s clear is that Tarrell cannot continue painting through the demons that still follow him, not with recurring nightmares whose aftereffects are this scary to his wife and son or the soon-to-arrive discovery that Joyce’s health is far more fragile than she’s let anybody know. The empathetic-to-everybody, superbly acted Exhibiting Forgiveness doesn’t reach any pat conclusions about the sort of absolution its title might suggest. With much emotional clarity, it faces the messy work of forgiving without forgetting head-on.
Peterson Reviews 