Frutivale Station

On the early morning of New Year’s Day 2009, one Oscar Grant was shot by police after an incident at a stop on the Bay Area Rapid Transit in Oakland. He died hours later. The shooting was caught by several passengers on cell phone video, and inspired both peaceful protests and violence in the city (I’ll decline to post a link to the video, but it’s been widely replayed in the media, so it’s easy to find). That video opens Fruitvale Station, named after the BART stop where the event took place.

Heavy stuff for any filmmaker, let alone director Ryan Coogler in his first feature-length picture. But he absolutely nails it, paying respectful tribute to the deceased while not shying away for depicting Grant’s story for what it is: a tragedy.

The film follows Grant’s last day on Earth before his death. Played by Michael B. Jordan, it depicts him a man in transition. Having served some time in prison, he tries to give up his meager living as a pot dealer and seeks to get a legitimate job to support his girlfriend (Melonie Diaz) and their daughter (Ariana Neal). Even though he’s not having the easiest time of it, there’s still the feeling that things are starting to look up for him. Sadly, he doesn’t know that he won’t return home from his planned trip into the city to celebrate New Year’s.

It’s hard to judge Jordan, or really anyone in the cast, by the normal parameters of acting because everyone so naturally fills each role. Little touches outside the main narrative of Grant going straight—playing with his daughter or chatting with family, friends, or strangers—seem like real video of a loving man going about his day. There are the standard film techniques any movie has, but it seems like we’re watching real people, not actors portraying them. And you start to love the man on the screen as if he’s real.

Which makes Grant’s fate later in the film so devastating. The scenes afterward of his family receiving the news of his death in the hospital are nearly unwatchable, like seeing real people hear the news of the death of a family member. The saddest thing I’ve seen in a movie in several years has Diaz about to tell her daughter, probably too young to really understand what happened, that her father is dead. Mercifully, it cuts away and spares us from it.

Knowing what’s going to happen doesn’t make the film any less engrossing. Every time Grant uses his cell phone (which, like many people, is quite often), the time and text message pop up on the screen next to him like a text bubble in a comic. This becomes like a doomsday clock, counting down to his coming demise, and as it inches closer, you start to tense up more and more.

When it happens, it’s completely one-sided in its depiction, not offering a shred from the cops’ point of view. But it’s so muddled and chaotic that it’s hard to tell if shooting really is excessive force or a mistake (which the officer who fired the fatal shot claimed). The way the incident plays out is a little too Hollywood, in a narrative sense (the incident that results in police being called is a scuffle with an enemy of Grant’s we saw in a flashback to his prison time, and the incident is videotaped by a grocery shopper Grant met earlier; both just happen to be on the same train as him). But this doesn’t dilute its power one bit.

Grant’s death has been compared to the case of Trayvon Martin, and the film might seem more prescient coming to wide release so soon after the George Zimmerman verdict. But instead of taking the macro viewpoint, the film eschews directly addressing any social or political issues (racial profiling, police brutality) and instead focuses on the micro. It reminds us that underneath the cultural discussion and reaction to his death, Oscar Grant was a human being. Flawed, maybe, but not a bad man. Someone with a soul mate, a child, a home, friends—in short, a life. And that life ended because an unfortunate misunderstanding turned tragic. This is a heartbreaking film, but also one with a sense of real humanity uncommon in the movies.