Fruitvale Station

It has won lots of plaudits and no doubt it is a powerful film but Fruitvale station ultimately leaves you feeling disappointed and to a certain extent the victim of manipulation. If you are going to deal with real life events you need to tread carefully. This film feels like it has trampled all over a very true and tragic story.

The film tells the story of Oscar Grant III, a 22-year-old from and the story of the last day of his life, before he was fatally shot by BART Police in the early morning hours of New Year's Day 2009. The day starts with Oscar (Michael B Jorden) and his girlfriend Sophina (Melonie Diaz) dropping off their daughter Tatiana at day care. Oscar stops by his old job at the deli counter of a grocery store from which he had been fired two weeks prior. He discards his stash of marijuana in an effort to get on a good path, and then attends his mother's birthday party. She encourages him to take BART to the festivities in San Francisco, which Oscar and his friends do. The train to the festivities is stalled temporarily, but Oscar and his friends turn the train into a party scene. On the return train, a customer from the grocery store recognizes Oscar and calls out his name, which leads him to be identified by a former fellow prison inmate, which leads to a scuffle. The police pull Oscar and his friends off the train, and one of the officers shoots Oscar in the back while Oscar is being held down.

The film is well directed and very well acted and the scene that leads to the shooting is as dramatic as you’d hope for. However, this film feels like you get a saccharine version of a real life person. You spend a day with Oscar who comes to the conclusion that he is going to become a better person. He is shown trying to save a fatally injured dog, being very nice to a customer in a store that he was fired from for being late once too often and lastly rather than sell his last stash of weed he throws it into the sea. It is a little too much. He is then caught up in a fight and brutally treated by the Police and is then shot dead, point blank and in the back during a scuffle. The director Ryan Coogler stated that he was interested in the fall out and how different sides used this event for their own political purposes. It is a shame that we don’t get to see that. The fall out is barely touched upon. There were widespread riots, the officer who mistakenly thought he was tasering Oscar was jailed for manslaughter. This was a tragic event and it feels a little cheapened in this debut. There could have just as easily been another movie made about a Police officer that when dealing with a disruptive and abusive suspect mistakenly pulls his gun in the heat of the moment rather than his taser, and ends up shooting the suspect by accident. He then loses his career and faces two years in prison as an ex-cop. Other questions as well are left unanswered, why didn’t Oscar just sit still and not kick off, what on earth was the officer thinking, looking to taser someone point blank? Disappointing.