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Viewers don’t want Grant to get carried away and be accused of assault. The manager is in the right – he’s already hired a more reliable replacement – but by then Grant has proven his good faith to the audience, which squirms when he places his hand on his former boss’ arm to keep him from walking off. He pleads with the manager who fired him to give him back his job. It takes a bit of gentle coaxing before she relaxes and accepts Grant’s offer of help, which includes a phone call to his Grandma Bonnie (Marjorie Shears).Ī few moments later, Grant isn’t so happy or lucky. She needs advice about a fish fry she’s promised her boyfriend for their New Year’s Eve dinner. In one astonishing sequence, Oscar goes shopping for them at Farmer Joe’s market in Oakland, where he worked until he was let go for repeated tardiness (and, in real life, falsifying his time cards).Ī young white woman named Katie (Ahna O’Reilly) walks up while Grant is talking to the counter-guy. New Year’s Eve is also his mother’s birthday, and Grant spends part of that day getting crabs for his grandma’s famous gumbo. “Fruitvale Station” is at its most trenchant and original when it dramatizes that for an urban black man like Grant, even the most casual, positive racial encounter demands careful negotiation.
Even James Garner’s Rockford spent five years in San Quentin, albeit on a trumped-up charge. When did a jail sentence automatically blight Americans’ view of a man or woman’s chance for redemption and a good life? Our culture used to celebrate people who graduated from the School of Hard Knocks and became, say, private eyes. “You already exposed her,” she says, with anger-tinged sadness, then repeats – “You already exposed her to this.”Īs an assured, absorbing movie that’s also a true document of its time, “Fruitvale Station” compels viewers to question the reflexive thoughts and feelings nurtured by too many junky cop movies and too much tabloid or cable news. “Yeah, but I don’t – she don’t need to be exposed,” he stammers. In a pungent flashback to a jail visitors’ room, Wanda advises Oscar to let his daughter come see him there. He dramatizes their effects on his relationships with his mother Wanda (Octavia Spencer), his girlfriend Sophina (Melonie Diaz) and his and Sophina’s child, Tatiana (Ariana Neal). First-time writer-director Ryan Coogler renders Grant’s last day on earth with passionate awareness of the tensions in working-class and African-American life.Ĭontrary to charges of “whitewashing” his protagonist, Coogler doesn’t ignore Grant’s drug dealing and jail time. What happens in between is what makes the film outstanding. The movie begins with actual cell-phone video of the killing – some of the same footage that catalyzed public protests when it was posted on YouTube – and reaches its climax with a reenactment of the crime and its immediate aftermath. (The officer contended that he’d confused his Taser and his gun he was convicted of involuntary manslaughter.) While Grant was being handcuffed, BART officer Johannes Mehserle shot him, fatally, in the back. A fight broke out, and police pulled young black men off the train. Grant and his friends were returning from celebrating at the Embarcadero when, in a fatal coincidence, he and a white brute he met in prison caught sight of each other. Empathy and authenticity keep you on the edge of your seat at “Fruitvale Station,” a fact-based movie shot in the cities where its story really occurred – Oakland, San Francisco and Hayward – and at the Fruitvale Station of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system, where a BART cop shot and killed Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old Hayward native, at 2:11 a.m.
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