Fruitvale Station (The Weinstein Company, R)

It’s admittedly one of those movies whose main goal is to make you angry at the world.

 

Even if you haven’t heard of Fruitvale Station prior to reading this review, you need to get ready to hear a lot about it. It was a huge hit at Sundance, where it premiered this past January, and has been doing incredibly well in limited release in other cities. It’s based on the true story of a young, unarmed Black father who was shot in the back by a police officer on the platform at Oakland’s Fruitvale Station on New Year’s Day in 2009. By coincidence, the film seems to be hitting something of a zeitgeist moment, what with the George Zimmerman trial verdict just coming in. And, oh yeah: Fruitvale Station is an excellent movie.

It’s admittedly one of those movies whose main goal is to make you angry at the world. I like movies that engage me in that way, and this one does a good job of it. That isn’t to say that it isn’t at least somewhat manipulative, though; by nature, this type of film is. Writer/director Ryan Coogler spends a great deal of the run-up to the incident showing what a good guy main character Oscar Grant (Michael B. Jordan) is, often in a very conspicuous way: He sneaks his daughter an extra packet of fruit snacks after her mother Sophina (Melonie Diaz) tells her no, he helps a dog that is hit by a car in the street, etc. But among all of the proving of Oscar’s societal worth, Coogler does create a complex character out of him. He has some roughness in his past and it seems like acting in anger is always a threat, and he cheated on Sophina and is trying to patch things up.

It’s the complexity of the role—and especially Jordan’s portrayal of him—that really make Fruitvale Station work. Though now all grown up, a lot of viewers will likely remember Jordan as Wallace from the first season of The Wire: He was the corn-rowed little minion of D’Angelo Barksdale. Here, the actor is able to sell every aspect of Oscar’s personality: his solidity as a human being, his likeability, his potential to descend into trouble, and his struggle for dignity. While the film may have worked if someone other than Jordan had been cast in this role, it really works with him in it. It doesn’t hurt that the rest of the cast is strong, too: Diaz is a likeable and underused young actress, and Octavia Spencer turns up as Oscar’s mother, and is wonderful as always.

Coogler makes a lot of other good choices here, from small things, such as finding a kinetic way to integrate cell phone culture into the narrative, to big things, such as highlighting the pure social outrage by using documentary footage to bookend the film. By the end of the film, I took it as yet another damning indictment of how bad the notoriously awful Oakland police are (remember that video from two years ago of the police pepper spraying the fuck out of some Occupy Oakland protesters, with no real provocation to do so at all?). Once the screening was over, though, I was talking to local film critic James Thomas, and he gently reminded me that, while this particular incident happened in Oakland, it’s wrongheaded of me to think that this is a story about Oakland—this is a story about America, if not the world. The Trayvon Martin case is all the further evidence you should need of that. | Pete Timmermann