Film Club 1: Fruitvale Station

The idea behind this Film Club is to pick a film that I think deserves more attention, and set my deputies and another TN2er the homework of watching it. They’ll then share their viewing experiences alongside mine. Ideally, we’ll all love my exquisite taste for cinema, and you’ll have four people recommending a film to you instead of just one. Or maybe you’ll never trust one of my reviews again.

Although I’ve written very briefly about our first film, Fruitvale Station (Ryan Coogler, 2013), in TN2 before, I picked it for Film Club as I believe it to be a criminally underseen masterpiece that continues to have great significance. Ryan Coogler’s feature début is a film that is sensitive, vital and ultimately devastating. As this is a film based on a true and very public tragedy, we do discuss the plot in depth.

The plot takes place over the final day that Oscar Grant (Michael B. Jordan) spent alive in Oakland, California. Oscar is an ex-con attempting to build his life back together; at various times we see him trying to raise his daughter, Tatiana (Ariana Neal), be an attentive boyfriend and be a good son. In spite of the temptations he faces to earn quick money by selling dope, he chooses to work towards a legitimate means of income and maintain his integrity as a reformed and better person. He chooses life with those he loves. That is, until white police officers make that choice inconsequential. In reality, it doesn’t matter that Oscar chooses to become better and actively works on making this happen, because his life is cut short by a racist system of oppression. He was my age (22) when he was killed by the police.

It is a difficult film to watch. It is a film that has left me paralysed with emotion and shock every time I have watched it – and I have watched it at least 10 times. This is a film that opens with the real-life mobile phone footage of a real-life murder of an unarmed Black man by a police officer who had sworn to protect and serve the citizen he has just killed. He was my age when he was killed by the police.

While Fruitvale Station feels like an effortlessly human portrayal of a man’s final hours, the film is masterfully constructed to achieve this. Notably and importantly, Oscar is not characterised as flawless, but human. Oscar and his girlfriend, Sophina (Melonie Diaz) are introduced discussing his infidelity after the title credits. Whilst his indiscretions may frustrate and hurt, you never dislike Oscar. This is significant, because these complications of character illustrate a portrait of complex humanity. Protagonists without flaws are not real people. They do not breathe and move and impact the way that Oscar does by showing his vulnerabilities. In spite of his missteps, he is a charming and affectionate man. He loves his daughter, and is a doting son, grandson and brother. He was my age when he was killed by the police.

Rachel Morrison’s cinematography is intimate and revealing of the tough decisions Oscar has to make throughout his day, eventually replaced by lingering shots of spaces that have been left by the characters in the build-up to the tragedy. As the final incident at Fruitvale Station begins to take place, the intimacy of the framing shifts into scrutiny and claustrophobia, evoking the cruel distress and oppressive atmosphere of the scene. Several tight shots of one police officer’s knee pressing down on Oscar’s neck are chillingly evocative of the murder of George Floyd by a policeman using the same supposed ‘method of restraint’. The film closes on a shot of Tatiana, and shows that, even if it doesn’t take their individual life, racist acts of police brutality and the threat thereof cast a seemingly unrelenting oppressive shadow on Black communities. Oscar Grant was my age when he was killed by the police, and Fruitvale Station taught me about this profound tragic injustice.

Director Ryan Coogler does not let you forget that this is a true story. The narrative of Fruitvale Station is bookended by footage of real events, opening with footage of Oscar Grant being detained by police at the Fruitvale BART station moments before he is shot, and closing with footage of people outside the same station four years later, celebrating Grant’s life. As we move into watching a dramatised version of the last day of Oscar Grant, portrayed by Michael B. Jordan, the film continues to prove its realism by using genuine locations around Oakland, the hometown of both Grant and Coogler.

Coogler’s familiarity with the area allows him to create a sense of home and community in every location throughout the film, which makes the shooting scene all the more brutal. When Grant gets shot in the back by a police officer at Fruitvale Station, it feels as though he has been murdered in his own home, surrounded by his own family. After an hour of Grant going about his day — hanging with friends, playing with his daughter, celebrating his mother’s birthday — we are brought back to the opening scene of Grant and his friends detained by police, but instead of distant, shaky cellphone footage, we are at the centre of the action. We hear Grant struggle to catch his breath, we see the blood drip from this mouth, we watch a close-up of his face as the sound of a gunshot rings out through the station.

While Michael B. Jordan does an excellent job bringing the audience on a journey through Grant’s last day alive, the emotional final third of the film after the shooting is driven by Octavia Spencer’s performance as Grant’s mother, Wanda Johnson. Sitting in a hospital waiting room with Grant’s friends and girlfriend, she manages to stay strong and look after them. As she finally breaks down while viewing her dead son’s body through a window, not allowed to give him a final hug goodbye, we feel the true impact of the police officer’s bullet.

Fruitvale Station tells an all-too-familiar story. Oscar Grant was not the first or the last Black person to die at the hands of those meant to protect them. This film reminds us that it is not only important to say their name, but to also remember their story. To remember that they were a real person, and that a real life has been taken.

WORDS BY URSULA DALE (EDITOR-IN-CHIEF)

The most striking element of Fruitvale Station is its tender tonality in its approach to such an essentially violent issue. The tone of the violence in its beginning resurfaces as a form of violent sadness in the film’s final moments, the conclusive shot being a real-life recording of Grant’s daughter Tatiana at a protest for justice for her father. This moment successfully—and tragically—breaches the distance between the dramatised depiction of paternal love we are consistently shown and the stark reality of its loss. Her face, angled away from the frame and shielded in part by hair, is a genuine emotional offer of just a fraction of the loss viewers will have experienced in their brief glimpse into (a performed version of) Grant’s life.

Animals are often a barometer for emotional response in cinema, serving to posit a figure’s emotional empathy and sincerity or, too often for my tastes, a character’s cruelty. Here, Michael B. Jordan offers a compellingly natural portrait of a sensitive and affectionate human being, a Black man whose moments of anger and aggression are humanistically rendered as instincts to protect or to be loved. In one the film’s most recognisable moments, we see Grant tenderly carrying a wounded dog in his arms. This moment of kindness and humility is an act of vastly greater dignity than the treatment received by ‘protectors of the community’ towards Grant himself, which we see actualised in the film’s opening and dramatised again in the film’s moves towards its conclusive act. Fruitvale Station is a response to brutal and ubiquitous violence against Black communities in America, and yet violence is made to feel intensely incongruous in a film so wholly tender in its approach to this man’s life.

While race became a defining factor in the death of Oscar Grant, Fruitvale Station is far from reductive in its approach to how it affected his lived experiences. A grainy, almost nostalgic aesthetic in many of the shots visually bolsters the atmosphere of the film, which doesn’t seek to glamourise Grant’s experiences, but also not to criminalise or worsen them in its depiction. As a wonderful and loving father, his relationship with his daughter becomes a focal point in his onscreen characterisation, and it is a warm moment between him and Tatiana that is instrumentalised as a transition between final shots of his unsuccessful surgery and his death. This familial scene, warm and fuzzy in a way befitting the film’s continued aesthetic charm, offers the final image of Oscar as a loving father. He is carrying his daughter on his back in a moment which speaks to the film’s broader message of his ability to elevate those around him, both in and outside of his community. Words spoken by Grant’s mother when he is in hospital seem to define the uplifting approach the film has in its attempt at visualising the Black experience in America: “We gotta lift him up...Let’s keep him lifted up.”

WORDS BY JAMES MCCLEARY (DEPUTY FILM EDITOR)

I went into Fruitvale Station with conflicted expectations. On the one hand, Coogler’s work on Black Panther (2018) resulted in some of the very best superhero cinema of all time, and I was extremely curious to see what he could do without a monstrous budget and its complementary whispering executives. On the other hand however, Creed (2015) had wholly failed to impress me, having lacked the uniqueness necessary to overcome my lifelong disinterest in generic boxing movies.

In its opening movements, I was disappointed to find that Fruitvale Station was gradually leaning towards the latter category. Though Michael B. Jordan’s performance as Oscar was impeccably multi-faceted and real, the events of his day in the lead-up to the titular incident had a distractingly stale aura. It all felt far too familiar, as if Coogler were simply ticking boxes in an effort to construct the most perfunctory calm before the storm. Some of these instances, such as the sequence wherein Oscar witnesses the death of a dog in the street, bordered on cliché, and all without that necessary hint of self-awareness.

But as the story closed in on its titular tragedy, the timeline began to slow down in accordance, allowing for longer and more intimate reincarnations of the scenes in the film’s first half, now tinted by the cover of darkness and the connotations of what I knew was still to come. With the simplest of alterations to the cinematographic style and the rhythm of each edit, Coogler had somehow managed to transform the monotony into a palpable sense of dread. I was enthralled consistently throughout the film’s final forty minutes, and by the time its titular, terrible tragedy finally took centre-stage, I was paralysed by its icy cold grit. It takes a bold filmmaker to root the camera firmly by Jordan’s side as he bleeds out and to sustain that image for what feels like eternity, capturing every beat and emotion of a life being drained away. These are images that will stick with me for some time, and more than made up for the mediocre drama of the film’s halcyon preamble.

Despite its briefness, Fruitvale Station demanded more of my time than either of Coogler’s lengthier pictures, as I spent days puzzling over the dichotomy of its inelegant overarching design and shockingly raw finale. This is obviously a topical film, and its ultimate tragedy has only become even more resonant as it continues to hold relevance today, seven years later. It is, at heart, a spiritual eulogy for those who have died at the mercy of American police officers, and in truth it matters little how roughly constructed the film may be when this endpoint so flawlessly taps into a crisis that has endured for generations. If cinema can be defined by perfect moments within muddled mechanisms, and I for one believe that it absolutely can, then Fruitvale Station is certainly a film worth your time.

Fruitvale Station is available to stream on Netflix.

ART BY LOLA FLEMING, REN O’HARE, & CIARÁN BUTLER