Fruitvale Station

This is the film that won the Audience and Grand Jury prizes at Sundance in 2013.  Basically, it was universally deemed the best film of the festival. 

Fruitvale Station is an account of the last day of Oscar Grant's life before he was shot by BART police in San Francisco. 

Some of the events of his day are real and some are invented, but the point is that the police did murder this young man.  The event, which occurred on New Year's Day 2009, was captured on cameras and cellular phones.  The film opens with one of the videos of police assaulting and then shooting Grant in the back as he lies face down on the ground.  It's a brazen introduction to a film.  It grabs your attention and lends an ominous sense of dread to the minutiae of Grant's final hours.

The entire movie hinges on Michael B. Jordan's performance as Oscar Grant.  And he's fantastic.  Jordan is an actor with a lot of promise.  He juggles a myriad of emotions effortlessly.  Fruitvale Station could've been just another independent film plagued by clunky, amateur acting, but Jordan lends an air of humanity to the film.

And humanity is the intent of the movie.  It captures a sense of the complexity that exists in each of us.  Despite the racial issues and largely black cast, Fruitvale Station is not a "black movie."  If anything, it's a "gray movie."  Nobody is perfect and nothing is black and white in this movie.  I have seen some complaints that Grant is depicted as a martyr in the film.  The only thing that makes the role feel that way is the charisma of Jordan.  Grant is a loser in the film.  He's a criminal and can't hold down a job.  While he may not be perfect, the point is that he feels real to the audience.  When Grant is killed in the end, it's not an injustice because he's a good person; it's an injustice because a human being was senselessly killed.

One worrisome thing about these types of stories is that it fosters a hatred of police.  The officers responsible for Oscar Grant's death are the least developed characters.  They literally materialize to assault Grant and his friends.  Nothing more.  For all the focus on the gray areas that this movie has, this part of the movie felt a little too black and white.  Other than one officer being confused as to why the other shot Grant, it does feel like the police are monsters that made an unprovoked attack on young, black men.  The vast majority of police officers are good people who're just trying to their best in a relatively thankless job.  Giving people weapons and power and placing them in dangerous and tense situations will inevitably lead to abuses of that power.  That does not excuse those abuses and any instances of police brutality should be intensely punished.  I'm just saying that the grotesque horrors of the police's arrival felt out of place in a film that otherwise never glorified or demonized its characters.

Fruitvale Station is phenomenal.  It's heartbreaking and funny.  It celebrates life and it shows the devastation that the loss of one life causes.  While there are other films from Sundance that I liked better, Fruitvale Station is the only one that seems like it could get people talking.  It's the one film from Sundance that feels important.  Watch it.


8 out of 10