Fruitvale Station (OG Project, Significant Productions, The Weinstein Company, 2013)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, June 20) I showed my husband Charles a movie I’d long wanted to see: Fruitvale Station (2013), the first film written and directed by one of the finest filmmakers active today, Ryan Coogler. I’ve been collecting Coogler’s work since I was blown away by his superhero extravaganza Black Panther (2018), his third film, and that led me to seek out his second, Creed (2015) as well as wait for the inevitable Black Panther sequel, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022). When I mentioned to Charles that I wanted to watch Fruitvale Station, he groaned and said, “I’d like to have seen that movie before 2019.” I realized that I’d stepped on a psychological land mine when he said that, because in 2019 Charles’s Black nephew, Miles Hall, was shot and killed by police officers in an incident tragically similar to the real-life shooting of unarmed Black man Oscar Julius Grant III (Michael B. Jordan, who also starred as the lead in Coogler’s Creed and the principal Black villain in Black Panther and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever) at the Fruitvale BART station on January 1, 2009 that inspired Coogler’s film. It wasn’t exactly the same – Oscar Grant was killed in the Fruitvale BART station after he got into a fistfight on a train with a white man he’d previously antagonized when both were inmates in San Quentin two years before, while Miles Hall had a history of mental illness and his grandmother (Charles’s mom) had called the police when he was having a seizure, only instead of treating him sensitively they confronted him and ultimately shot him – but it was close enough that for Charles it opened up a lot of old wounds. (Miles’s mother, Charles’s Black half-sister Taun, set up the Miles Hall Foundation, which, according to its Web site at https://www.themileshallfoundation.org, “promotes initiatives that will save lives and will protect those impacted by mental illness.”)

What makes Fruitvale Station a particularly beautiful and compelling movie is that it refuses either to glamorize Oscar Grant or to suggest that he brought his death upon himself. Though for some reason Variety reviewer Geoff Berkshire criticized the film’s “relentlessly positive portrayal" of Grant and added, “Best viewed as an ode to victim's rights, Fruitvale forgoes nuanced drama for heart-tugging, head-shaking and rabble-rousing," that’s one of those reviews that makes me wonder if the critic saw the same film I did. The thing I liked best about the movie is precisely that it refused either to idealize Grant or to damn him. Instead, we get a multi-dimensional portrayal of Grant as a man who’s trying to live the best life he can under his rather dire circumstances, but is sometimes his own worst enemy. When the film begins he and his partner Sophina (Melonie Diaz) are having an argument because she caught him having extra-relational activity with another woman. He claims that’s the only time he’s ever had sex with anyone but her in their whole relationship and specifically says that was his only time with that particular “other woman” – and neither she nor we believe him. The two have a daughter, Tatiana (Ariana Neal), whom they’re somehow raising the money to send to a private elementary school. Grant’s mother Wanda (Octavia Spencer) was born on New Year’s Eve and is planning an elaborate birthday party for herself, for which she asks Oscar to pick up crabs and shrimp for her fabled gumbo. Oscar goes to Farmer Joe’s market for these items; he pretends he’s still working there, but in fact he was fired two weeks before. He pleads with the owner for his job back, even offering to work full-time for half-time pay, but the owner refuses on the ground that he’s already hired someone else, and that person doesn’t come in late the way Oscar did. Oscar has another source of income as a small-time drug dealer, in which capacity he drives out to the Oakland oceanfront to meet a customer who’s going to buy a bundle of marijuana from him – only before the guy arrives, Oscar thinks better of it and throws the pot into the ocean. Then the guy shows up and Oscar gives him a small baggie of something or other for free.

Oscar also befriends a stray dog (the dog gets a credit line and is played by “Ian”) at a gas station he’s pulled up to, only a hit-and-run driver runs over and kills the dog in an odd, if somewhat clumsily “planted,” parallel to what’s going to happen to him at the end of the movie. We already know that Oscar Grant III is going to perish in a confrontation with police because Coogler opened the film with actual video footage of Grant being gunned down in the Fruitvale BART station – something he was at first unwilling to do. “I didn’t want any real footage in the film,” Coogler said later. “But you sometimes have to take a step back. Being from the Bay Area, I knew that footage like the back of my hand, but more people from around the world had no idea about this story. It made sense for them to see that footage and see what happened to Oscar, and I think it was a responsibility that we had to put that out there.” There are a few too many instances of Coogler “planting” hints in the film that lead to the ultimate resolution. One is the dog sequence, and another is the flashback to Oscar’s incarceration that shows the white fellow convict he had his beef with who would turn up two years later in the BART train and provoke the confrontation that ultimately led to Oscar’s death. (Remarkably, Coogler was able to get permission to photograph this scene inside the real San Quentin prison.) There’s also a later scene in which Wanda persuades herself that she was to blame for Oscar’s death because she urged him to take BART to the San Francisco New Year’s fireworks instead of driving there. And there’s a sequence in Farmer Joe’s in which a young white woman named Katie (Ahna O’Reilly) is at the fish counter shopping for supplies for a fish fry she’s hosting that night. Oscar offers to help and even puts his mom on the phone to give Katie advice, and it’s pretty clear Oscar is cruising her. Later Katie will turn up on the BART train and call out to Oscar, which alerts his white nemesis from San Quentin that he’s there, and still later she appears as an amateur videographer who recorded the police assault and murder of Oscar. Otherwise Coogler remained close not only to the real-life story but to the task of keeping Oscar’s character basically sympathetic without turning him into the saint he decidedly wasn’t.

Fruitvale Station is an appropriately edgy film but also a beautifully made one, well staged by Coogler and vividly acted by Michael B. Jordan (who under Screen Actors’ Guild regulations has to bill himself with that middle initial to avoid confusion with the basketball superstar Michael Jordan, who’s also appeared in films), Melonie Diaz, Octavia Spencer (who offered to put up her own salary for the film’s production when Coogler was having trouble meeting his budget), Ariana Neal and even the white actors who play the villainous cops, Kevin Durand and Chad Michael Murray. Aside from a few filler themes from Ludwig Göransson (the white Swedish composer whom Coogler met at USC’s film school and has worked with ever since), the film is scored entirely with hip-hop music, though the opening track, despite its typically raunchy rap title “Mob Shit,” is actually a surprisingly lyrical and infectious groove by The Jacka, Cellski and Peezy, and while the rest of the music is the typical rap sludge it works perfectly in context as the sort of music you’d expect Oscar Grant III to be listening to. One thing I’d have liked to see more of in the film is some insight into the male members of Grant’s family: his mother and grandmother both appear as characters and as ongoing presences in his life, but his father and grandfather are nonentities. The Wikipedia page on Oscar Grant III gives at least some clues as to why: it said that Oscar Grant II was himself serving time in San Quentin. As a result, when various members of Oscar Grant III’s family sued BART for wrongful death, the women got settlements but Grant’s father got nothing because they ruled he’d never played a meaningful part in his son’s life due to his own incarceration. Still, the fact that Oscar Grant had a “III” on the end of his name suggests there must have been something about the male half of his lineage to be important to somebody!