Ryan Coogler (2013)
In the early hours of New Year’s Day 2009, a twenty-two-year-old African-American called Oscar Grant was shot by a transport police officer on a platform of Fruitvale Station in Oakland, California. Grant, who had been unarmed, died in hospital a few hours later. The officer, Johannes Mehserle, was charged with first degree murder. At his trial Mehserle claimed that he’d drawn and used his handgun by mistake – that he’d intended to Taser the young man. The trial jury was instructed to limit its deliberations to charges of second degree murder, voluntary and involuntary manslaughter. Mehserle was acquitted of the first two and found guilty of the third. He received a two-year jail sentence and was released after serving eleven months. Ryan Coogler’s film (he also wrote the screenplay) begins with footage of the shooting, which was recorded on the cell phones of several witnesses as well as on CCTV. It ends with news film of a demonstration – with placards asking for Oscar Grant to be remembered and for belated justice to be done – outside Fruitvale Station on the fourth anniversary of the incident. A few days after this demonstration took place Fruitvale Station was screened at Sundance, where it won both the Grand Jury Prize and the Audience Award for a US drama. The film went on to take the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes in 2013 and did well in the main American awards season later in the year – with ‘breakthrough of the year’ wins or nominations for Coogler and Michael B Jordan, who plays Oscar, and recognition of Octavia Spencer, who plays his mother, in the supporting actress category. Fruitvale Station was made, through Forest Whitaker’s production company, for a budget of around $900,000. Its box office takings worldwide currently amount to something over £17m.
Apart from a flashback to where Oscar Grant was two years previously, on New Year’s Eve in 2006, the action of Fruitvale Station comprises – and is charged with the knowledge that you’re watching – the last twenty-four hours or so of his life. Ryan Coogler relies on this knowledge for impact. He also tends to contrivance in order to sharpen the ironic painfulness of what eventually transpires. Oscar sits looking out onto San Francisco Bay, thinking about his past and his future: the flashback to his time in jail for drug-related offences in late 2006 (although this wasn’t the only time he went to prison) causes him such remorse that he throws into the sea the narcotics he’s been planning to sell. It’s not clear, though, what evidence there really was that he turned over this new leaf on the last day of his life. Oscar has been fired from the supermarket where he worked. He returns there on the morning of New Year’s Eve to buy food for his mother’s birthday celebration meal that evening and to try (unsuccessfully) to get his job back. While he’s at the supermarket, he gets into conversation with, and helps out, a pleasant white woman who’s clueless about how to cook her boyfriend’s favourite meal. This woman turns up again on the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) underground train on which the incident occurs that brings the BART transport police to Fruitvale Station; indeed, she’s one of those who record Oscar’s killing on her phone. Even if this really happened, which seems highly unlikely, Coogler would have done better not to include it because the woman’s reappearance is too dramatically neat: someone who could have been a character witness for Oscar turns out to be an actual witness to, and provide real evidence of, his killing. Outside a garage in the Bay Area, Oscar fusses a stray dog which, a few moments later, is knocked down by a car and fatally injured: the sequence is, of course, distressing to watch but you know immediately from the deliberate close-up on the animal’s bloody muzzle that this image is going to prefigure blood on the mortally wounded Oscar’s face, and so it does. There are occasions when Coogler overdoes the poignancy: the farewell between Oscar and his young daughter Tatiana, as he prepares to go out on New Year’s Eve, is too fraught with significant looks that are held too long. (On a different level: there’s a goof in the conversation between Oscar and his mother when she visits him in prison in December 2006. She talks about Tatiana’s watching WALL-E, which didn’t appear until mid-2008.)
Even so, Ryan Coogler, who was only twenty-six when he shot Fruitvale Station, has made a first feature that’s not only highly involving but has many fine qualities. Of course you can’t fail to be shocked and enraged, even with the knowledge of what’s coming, by Oscar’s killing – or by what precedes it: the fact that the BART police, when they arrive to investigate the aggro on the train, make a beeline for young black men, even though it’s a less than young white man who starts the trouble. There have been too many other highly publicised instances of racially prejudiced policing in America for you to doubt the truth of what’s shown here. Fruitvale Station is a film that it was important to make in order to increase public awareness both of what happened in a particular real-life case and of the larger and persisting problem that case epitomises. (It’s something of a sad irony that Oscar Grant’s death came a few weeks after America had elected its first black President.) Coogler gets tragic resonance from the small things that Oscar does around the home: when, the awful morning after, his partner Sophina takes a shower with Tatiana, the sequence begins on the shower head that we saw Oscar turn on at the start of the previous day. The device of putting up on screen the texts Oscar sends to friends and family has a different meaning once Coogler has shown what else smart-phones can do. Oscar’s relationships with Sophina and his mother Wanda are convincingly nuanced: just because there are serious tensions between them doesn’t mean those tensions have to be always salient and Coogler, both in his script and his direction of the actors, is good at recognising this. For example, Oscar drops a bombshell when he tells Sophina that he’s lost his job but she’s not going to have that spoil their trip into San Francisco to see the New Year fireworks. You’re primed of course for the catalysing incident on the train to happen and the suspense is increased by its being delayed. The train is stuck between stations when midnight strikes but frustration about missing the big moment isn’t the incendiary factor: at this point, the atmosphere on the crowded train, packed with passengers of different races and ages, remains good-humoured.
As Oscar, Michael B Jordan has strong, effortless audience rapport and I don’t think this is simply because you know what’s going to happen to Oscar and feel sorry about that. Jordan is especially good at suggesting the thin line between Oscar’s genial exuberance and his irresponsibility. His appearing in virtually every scene until the fatal shot is fired means that you experience Jordan’s disappearance from the action as a real loss. A strength of all three main actors – Melonie Diaz (Sophina) and Octavia Spencer (Wanda) as well as Jordan – is in how well they sustain a sense of the difference between what their characters will reveal in public as distinct from private conversation. This is a particularly powerful element of Octavia Spencer’s performance. Wanda’s sociable warmth and sense of responsibility seem to be in continuing conflict with her persistent worrying about her son: the climax to this occurs when surgeons are fighting to save Oscar’s life and his mother leads prayers for him in a hospital waiting room. Exhorting Sophina and his friends to be strong is the way that Wanda keeps herself going. The moment when she goes in to view Oscar’s dead body is almost an anti-climax, perhaps because Coogler has Wanda voice her remorse: it was she who advised her son to take the train rather than drive into the city. Wanda Grant may well have done this but, since the audience is already well aware of it, the director might have done better to let Octavia Spencer’s face do the job that he gives to her lines. Ariana Neal is beautifully expressive as the child Tatiana and Ryan Coogler directs her with real skill.
10 June 2014
