Review: FRUITVALE STATION Is Hardly The Movie It Could Have Been

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Fruitvale Station — **

There’s no question about it. Oscar Grant’s story had to be told. In 2009, this young black man was fatally shot by a white BART police officer at Oakland’s Fruitvale Station sparking protests and even riots. It was a tragedy, and that his killer only served 11 months in prison is an injustice. His murder, not unlike Trevon Martin’s, brought about the simple truth that even Barack Obama’s America is hardly a post-racial nation.

Yet that’s not the conversation Ryan Coogler wants to have with Fruitvale Station. The film, which follows the final day in Oscar Grant’s life, doesn’t tread into uncomfortable territory and serves as a tribute to a martyr rather than a movie that investigates the true nature of the crime. If it’s an attempt at a docudrama, it’s a rather inauthentic one. And if it’s trying to capture the life of a man in one single day, it fails.

Part of the reason is there are basic truths presented and then re-presented about Oscar Grant, played here by Michael B. Jordan of Friday Night Lights. He’s a father who loves his daughter. Because of that, he’s willing to take the hard road rather than an easy one he went down before. He’s a son and a brother, one who would do anything for his family.

When Oscar Grant tells his daughter on the evening he is killed that he’ll take her to Chuck E. Cheese the next day, we know it. When he dumps a bag of marijuana into the bay because he doesn’t want to deal again despite having no other job, we know it. And when he says he’ll help his sister with rent or buys his mom a little extra crab for her birthday dinner, we know it. We know it all so well that any audience member with knowledge of the incident, or anyone who was simply paying attention in the first few minutes of the film, feels emotionally manipulated when he or she should feel connected.

It’s not that the actors don’t try, though. Octavia Spencer gives a performance here that justifies her Oscar more so than the movie for which she won it (The Help). The moment when Spencer, playing Oscar’s mother Wanda, sees Oscar’s body features authentic human emotion in a film that tries too hard to achieve it. And as Oscar, Michael B. Jordan carries the same quiet concern that made him so wonderful to watch on Friday Night Lights. I wanted to care more for him than I was able to in the end, but that’s Coogler’s fault not Jordan’s.

Writer/director Coogler, a native of Oakland, doesn’t seem to have either the necessary distance from the incident or the self-awareness to be so close to it. Unlike Spike Lee, whose New York stories are intellectually satisfying slices of his own community, Coogler isn’t concerned with the environment that surrounds the incident or the characters who live in it. And unlike Errol Morris, he can’t seem to distance himself from the material enough for a forensic investigation of this obvious injustice.

If there’s good news, it’s that Coogler is a good filmmaker. He makes a competent movie with flourishes of great filmmaking. He just, more often than not, points his lens in the wrong direction. And in the final moments of the film, when we are confronted with an image of Oscar’s real life daughter at a memorial/protest at Fruitvale Station, it would have been more emotionally devastating to see the BART shooter in a prison jumpsuit and then again being released from prison. While we know that there was more to Grant than being a victim, the film doesn’t allow us to realize anything but. And that too is an injustice.

Fruitvale Station, starring Michael B. Jordan and Octavia Spencer and directed by Ryan Coogler, is now playing.