“FRUITVALE STATION” My rating: A (Now playing wide.)
90 minutes | MPAA rating: R
If “Fruitvale Station” was concerned only with a young man’s death on an Oakland train platform early in the hours of Jan. 1, 2009, it would be hard going, indeed.
But Ryan Coogler‘s stunning writing/directing debut is less about dying than about living, and by attempting to limn the world of one individual it becomes the story of an entire class of contemporary Americans.
“Fruitvale Station” was inspired by the shooting by a Bay Area Rapid Transit cop of 22-year-old Oscar Grant. I’m giving nothing away by letting you know that Oscar dies. It’s the first thing you see in the movie.
In grainy cell-phone video — Is this real footage or a re-enactment? Can’t tell — we see transit police officers standing over several young black men sitting with their backs against a wall of the Fruitvale BART station. A ruckus breaks out and the cops jump on one of the young men, who is lying on the concrete. We hear observers yelling at the officers to stop. Suddenly there’s a gunshot…
Melonie Diaz
The film proper begins almost 24 hours earlier. Oscar (the Oscar-bound Michael B. Jordan), his live-in girlfriend Sophina (Melonie Diaz) and their pre-school age daughter Tatiana (Ariana Neal) are waking up on Dec. 31, 2008.
Oscar and Sophina are having a quiet early-a.m. argument. Oscar has had sex with another woman. He says it only happened once. No, she says, you only got caught once.
But Oscar swears fidelity, says he wants nothing more than to spend the rest of his life with Sophina and little Tatiana, in whose presence he becomes the playful, loving and responsible Daddy.
We follow Oscar through his day. He goes to a grocery story to buy food for a big birthday bash that night for his mother, Wanda (Octavia Spencer). While there he begs his former boss to give him back his job — he was fired two weeks earlier for being regularly late for his shift.
“Do you want me selling dope?” the desperate young man asks the manager, who has already filled Oscar’s old position and cannot rehire him.
He hasn’t told Sophina that he’s out of work.
Out on the street a speeding car run down a stray dog. Oscar holds the animal until it gives a final shudder.
That night, with little Tatiana safe at her aunt’s house, Oscar, Sophina and friends take the train into San Francisco to watch the New Year’s fireworks. On the way back there’s a delay and the group turn the car into a nightclub with a pair of battery-powered speakers and an iPod. Everyone — black, white, gay, straight — boogies down.
Like a square dance in a John Ford film, it’s a diverse community suddenly coming together.
And all the while they’re getting closer to Fruitvale Station.
Butler's Cinema Scene 