Movie Review: ‘Fruitvale Station’ 4 Stars! Actor Michael B. Jordan Explains The Goal of The Film

By Kyle Osborne

The film opens with blurry cell-phone cam footage of a few guys sitting on the ground, near the platform of a BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) station. It’s hard to make out exactly what’s going on…until the sharp sound of a gunshot rips through the air, and the screen goes to black.

You have just seen the killing of Oscar Grant III, a flawed, ordinary man who died lying on his face, the victim of a single shot from a police officer. It’s only a few hours into 2009, the end of a New Year’s Eve celebration. Grant , his girlfriend, and other friends, had taken the train into San Francisco from their homes in Oakland. Grant never made it back.

Director and writer Ryan Coogler has made a wrenching, serious film that, to its credit, stops well short of sensationalism and polemics. Instead, the film wants only to humanize a man who could have easily been just a statistic, had not dozens of BART riders pulled out their cameras and cell phones to record the death of an unarmed black man, wearing a hoodie. Does that sound familiar?

“Fruitvale Station,” which won the audience award at the Sundance Film Festival last winter, arrives at a time when Americans are acutely aware of the perils of profiling. It would have been easy for Coogler to exploit the sentiment, and ratchet up the controversy. Instead, he chooses to simply show the last 24 hours of Oscar Grant’s life. Some will argue that the film is trying to make the late Grant out to be a “saint,” but, to the contrary, every positive point is dinged with a negative trait—much like, you know, a normal human being.  As we see, Grant has served time for drug dealing, but he loves his mother dearly. He has tough guy tattoos, probably gang-related, but he loves his little girl and treats her with the kind of sweetness that any father of a daughter can relate to.. He’s been fired from his most recent job at a meat market, but he desperately wants to work. He’s not a saint, but he’s certainly not a thug. Grant’s mundane life in Oakland was unremarkable, and yet he was a three-dimensional human being. Someone who didn’t deserve to die the way he did.

Since we know how this story ends, there is a palpable sense of anxiety and foreboding. It takes some old-fashion movie making to keep us interested, and Coogler is not above making this an “entertaining” film, as opposed to a dry documentary. Having said that, nothing happens that is unrealistic or over-the-top. In fact, it’s the very banality of Grant’s existence that makes us want to say to the screen, “This is the last day of your life, man—do something special.”

Actor Michael B. Jordan delivers a performance that is raw and real—he doesn’t try to “dress up” his character. There’s a bit of slouch, a lot of “bruh” in his vocabulary, and someone who is making steps toward a more responsible life, while still a 22 year old “ Oscar winner Octavia Spencer plays his mother with grace and understatement.

Is everything true in the movie? Almost certainly not. I always tell folks that, regardless of the film, even movies based on fact will, and have to, use poetic license. In the end, this is a storytelling medium that forces the authors and directors to fit things into two hours or less.

And now to address the elephant in the room: The timing of this four year old story and the controversial George Zimmerman verdict is, by all accounts, coincidental. But many viewers at a recent preview screening, predominantly African Americans, were visibly shaken by the film. Some in tears, others audibly angry. To those movie goers, the deaths of Grant and Trayvon Martin are part of the same thread, separated only by a little time. One woman left the theater in tears saying, “There is no justice in this country.” Another man spontaneously shouted, “What the f—!” when he read the on-screen postscript, which detailed the outcome of events subsequent to the 2009 shooting. Emotions are still very close to the surface, but ‘Fruitvale Station’ never advocates anything but peaceful action. The characters in Spike Lee’s ‘Do The Right Thing’ might not recognize these 2009 Californians.

It’s important to note that Asians, Caucasians and Latino audience members were also seen crying at the film’s conclusion.  A compelling story, well told, knows no racial boundaries. If only the rest of the world could follow suit.

‘Fruitvale Station’ gets  4 out of 4 stars. Actor Michael B. Jordan, who plays Oscar, discusses the movie in the video below.