Or, A Dealer and a Gentleman.
You'd expect a movie about the shooting of a young black man by a white transit officer to be about race. Fruitvale Station might be the best movie on the subject since Do the Right Thing–but it's so different.
Fruitvale Station has none of that film’s flaming, righteous fury. If its moments are smaller, though, they are actually more powerful and more realistic. As a result, it manages to be a profoundly sad and profoundly optimistic movie at the same time. It's a pretty hard hat trick to pull off, and director Ryan Coogler deserves a lot of credit for it.
The movie is framed by the last day of Oscar Grant’s life. This is a brilliant conceit because it allows Coogler to show Oscar (Michael B. Jordan) as the ordinary, complicated, conflicted, imperfect human being that all 22-year-old men are. Michael B. Jordan recently starred in Chronicle, another very clever and affecting movie about young men and their mistakes, and he does a good job of making Oscar likeable. Not an antihero or a lovable cad, just a young man who’s made mistakes–big ones–and continues to make them, but certainly doesn't deserve to die for it.
On New Year’s Eve Oscar is on the knife’s edge. Sure, he’s a drug dealer and serial cheater on his Latina girlfriend Sophina (Melonie Diaz), but he’s also genuinely trying to go straight. Of course we’ve seen this scenario many times before, but Fruitvale Station departs from the formula.
It’s clear from the narrative that if Oscar hadn’t died that night he would have made it, and that’s a big part of the tragedy. In another movie, Oscar would either fail because the world was stacked against a young black man, or succeed because of his sheer individual grit and determination. In Fruitvale Station, Oscar is a nice guy, but he’s no hero. He’s going to make it because he has a rainbow of supporters who believe in him and are helping him out.
There’s his mother Wanda (Octavia Spencer), who withholds a hug in prison and saves him, and is punished by being denied a hug in the hospital after he dies; Sophina, who could have turned into a harpy when he admits he’s been lying to her about losing his job but instead chooses to stand by him; and the white web developer who Oscar does a small favor for, and promises to return it many times over.
Maybe that moment, which implies that had Oscar lived this might have been his future, is patronizing, platitudinous and poetic in equal measure. Fruitvale Station is not perfect or without its clumsy moments. There’s a scene where Oscar’s daughter Tatiana (the adorable Ariana Neal) worries about him leaving because she thinks the fireworks sound like gunshots. That feels a little like a sledgehammer blow to the face, especially considering an earlier shot of white kids holding fireworks that has already made the same point.
On the other hand, I don’t want to subscribe to the theory that I don’t like symbolism unless it goes over my head. Coogler has gotten some flak for a scene in which Oscar befriends a stray pit bull which then gets run over. I'm not sure if the problem is that this never actually happened (don’t we all understand what “based on a true story” means?) or the symbolism is too on-the-nose (young black men are like pit bulls, get it?) This feels a little like the way design snobs criticize Ikea because it allows the plebs to have stylish furniture. Just because Fruitvale Station is an indie movie with a low budget and cinematography that’s a little rough around the edges doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be accessible to the same audience as the summer blockbuster playing in the auditorium next door.
This optimistic view of the world, in which the only people who truly see the world in black and white are the police–and even they get a moment of understanding, surrounded by an uncooperative, angry mob–feels very much inspired by the Bay Area, where a scene in which a gorgeous crazy quilt of revelers ends up celebrating the New Year stuck on a BART train feels like it’s celebrating the best of us. As does the scene in which Oscar gives a young white woman advice on how to fry fish. Actress Ahna O’Reilly does a great job of conveying that particular off-balance feeling well-meaning white people have when talking to a black person they don’t know, and you could feel the amusement in the auditorium, the white viewers chuckling in shared embarrassment, the black viewers chuckling in shared recognition. Maybe that’s why it’s so appropriate that BART should play such a major role in the movie–frankly, it should have a screen credit.
Maybe it won’t resonate elsewhere, and Fruitvale Station will be just another racial litmus test. That would be a real shame, because it has a beautiful, if somewhat flawed, vision–and if that’s not a metaphor for our country right there, I don’t know what is.
