Early in the morning on New Year’s Day 2009, 22-year-old black drug dealer Oscar Grant was shot in the back and killed by a white cop in Oakland’s Fruitvale Station as dozens of witnesses watched and even filmed what was happening. Why?
Until the end credits, “Fruitvale Station” completely avoids telling you, and even then it omits key information in favor of an injunction to all of us to seek justice for Oscar. Ending a film with a call to protest, though, is primarily a way of claiming sociopolitical importance and the awards that go with it.
The Grant shooting takes place in the opening moments of this debut film by Ryan Coogler that captured the two top prizes at this year’s Sundance Festival, honors given less for its uneven quality than for its supposed value as a statement.
Most of “Fruitvale Station” consists of flashbacks set during the final, not very eventful day of Grant’s life. We learn that Grant (an undistinguished Michael B. Jordan), a recent guest of the San Quentin prison (for gun possession, a fact unmentioned in the film), cheats on his girlfriend (with whom he has a 4-year-old daughter), has a stash of weed he intends to sell and has just been fired by a grocery store for being late to work. Yet he is a loving son to his mom (a typically riveting Octavia Spencer) and spends part of the day preparing for her birthday party that evening. She advises him, when leaving to go view the New Year’s Eve fireworks on the bay, that he should take the BART train instead of driving.
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The film, shot in a potent quasi-documentary style, half-heartedly claims that Grant’s last day was also the one on which he became an honest man. But given the vanishingly small likelihood that an established criminal’s promise to go straight at any given moment should be taken seriously, the film doesn’t push the idea of incipient redemption too much. It does, however, nudge us into making Grant more lovable with completely made-up scenes such as one in which he cares for a dog hit by a car. (The poster shows Grant with hands clasped in an almost saintly pose.)
The only remarkable aspect of Grant’s life was its end, and despite being exceedingly brief, the movie suffers by keeping us waiting for an hour with such banalities as Grant’s stop to get gas. Once we’re in Fruitvale Station, though, Coogler creates a gripping and chaotic atmosphere as a scuffle on a train leads to the arrests of Grant and several friends. Frightening insults fly and the arrested men chafe against the cops.
So why would even the stupidest or most brutal cop in the world shoot an unarmed man in front of a huge crowd? Because Grant wouldn’t show his hands and the cop thought he might be reaching for a weapon. So the officer reached for his Taser, or so he believed, and stepped away to give the stun gun room to function. One of Grant’s friends said he heard the officer say, “I’m going to tase him” before firing (another inconvenient fact left out of the film).
The film, then, places a heavy hand on the scales of justice as it winds up with a fuzzy plea — an implied demand for a second, federal civil rights trial for the cop, who got a light sentence. But the shooting wasn’t a racist one.
In the end, what is the meaning of the film? Grant’s demise was unfortunate, and those who knew him must mourn his loss. Nevertheless, his slaying was not intended, and the videos of the actual shooting don’t support a claim of outrageous policing. Grant’s death was no more pregnant with lessons for society than if he had been hit by a bus.