Fruitvale Station

“Fruitvale Station” is based on a case — the shooting death of 22-year-old Oakland native Oscar Grant by transit police on a subway platform in the early morning hours of New Year’s Day, 2009. But there’s nothing sensational about Coogler’s approach. He even starts with the real, pixelated cell-phone video of Grant’s death — not, as some have suggested, to add to the feeling of encroaching dread, but rather to defuse it, lest anyone in the theater not already know how this particular story ends. From there, Coogler retraces the final 24 hours of Grant’s life, and much of what follows feels as authentic as the movie’s documentary opening. Coogler strings together small, incidental scenes that, when put together, form a complex portrait of a wayward young man trying to get his life on the right track. The operative word there is “trying,” for it is one of “Fruitvale’s” strengths that at no point does the film suggest Grant would have been sure to succeed. By the time the movie begins, the character has already served two state prison sentences and has something of an innate gift for falling in with the wrong crowd. And while it’s true that Coogler shows us Grant the loving son (to a nurturing mom, beautifully played by Octavia Spencer), husband (to patient wife Melonie Diaz) and father (to a 4-year-old daughter), he and the extraordinary young actor playing the role, Michael B. Jordan, also give us Grant the fast talking, streetwise hustler, who can’t manage to hold down a job and seems ill prepared for the world of adult responsibility. Grant is a guy whose New Year's resolution is to clean up his act – because he has just been mortifyingly caught cheating by Sophina, who is contemptuous of Grant's mumbling claims that this was the only time he had strayed. It was just the only time he'd been caught, she snaps. This shrewd truth-telling chimes, in my view, with the political rage at the end of the movie. Coogler's camera tracks Grant's final day as he roams about, buying a birthday card for his mother, talking to his brother, taking a difficult call from his sister, setting up an abortive drug deal, getting bad news about his job, picking his girlfriend up from work and finally parking his daughter with the sitter and getting ready to take the train into San Francisco with Sophina and his friends to watch the new year fireworks. The movie follows Grant in what amounts to dramatic real time. But with one expertly positioned flashback to a traumatic period in his life, and a highly charged conversation with his mother: a confrontation whose painful unintended consequences continue right up to the film's final moments. It ends with some tough love on Wanda's part and is, arguably, the first real wake-up call in Grant's life, the second being the discovery of his sexual indiscretion.

I believe that Oscar was on the verge of turning his life around, proving that people can change.Coogler's film gives him the benefit of the doubt, the film-making equivalent, perhaps, of a presumption of innocence. It is a gesture of faith.