Watched Fruitvale Station This Weekend

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The director seems to portray it as a puff piece for Grant on many interviews.

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Every year, there is one indie film that manages to break out of Sundance and push through the year, scooping up buzz and accolades as it snowballs towards awards season. Last year, it was the bayou epic Beasts of the Southern Wild, a film that netted a respectable amount of Oscar nominations and audience attention.

This year's Sundance wonder, Fruitvale Station, already looks poised to be an even bigger success, and after seeing it, it's no wonder why. It's a poignant portrait of an American tragedy, one that still burns raw in certain circles. Writer/director Ryan Coogler's retrospective on the last day in the life of Oscar Grant III is sure to break through even the hardest of hearts.

Coogler makes no bones about drawing out the suspense of the story: he opens the film with the notorious blurry cellphone footage taken on a San Francisco train station platform on New Year's Day 2009, which showed several police officers subduing a group of young black men. Things get physical, men get cuffed, bystanders yell for the cops to stop . . . and then the crack of a gun sends us into the abyss. It is a story we've seen unfold in the news before: overzealous cops overstepping their authority, misunderstandings turning deadly, lives snuffed out for seemingly no reason.

But Coogler doesn't dwell on the political or social fallout of the incident. Instead, he sets the bulk of the film the day before the fateful shooting at Fruitvale Station -- the last day in the life of Oscar Grant III (Michael B. Jordan), the 22-year-old victim. This story is about the victim, painting a portrait of a man unaware of the fate that is going to befall him on the first morning of the new year. Oscar's a regular guy, trying to make ends meet for his girlfriend Sophina (Hamlet 2's Melonie Diaz) and young daughter Tatiana (the adorable Ariana Neal). New Year's Eve also happens to be his mother's birthday, and Oscar is playing the role of the dutiful son to Wanda (Octavia Spencer).

The glimpses of family interaction Coogler gives us shows a loving family that isn't without its problems, and as the film plays out, we realize that it isn't a whitewashed canonization of Grant: he's done time for selling pot, and he's just lost his job at a local supermarket. Still, Grant sees 2009 as an opportunity to turn his life around. And as the film plays out to its heartrending conclusion, the tragedy slowly gains more weight, until it drops on your head like a ton of bricks.

The part of Oscar Grant is one that would too easily fall into saccharine territory in a lesser actor's hands. Yet Michael B. Jordan, who has showcased his talent in roles on The Wire and Friday Night Lights, carefully, expertly keeps from stepping into that zone. Already being touted as our generation's answer to Denzel Washington, I personally think Jordan has a much more natural physicality and warmth in his performances than most actors have at his age. Here, we are not seeing a performance -- just the man himself, living the last hours of his life.

The supporting turns are quite excellent. Diaz gives great dimensionality to a part that could've easily fallen into the one-dimensional "girlfriend" role we've seen countless times before. And Octavia Spencer outstrips her Oscar-winning role in a part that, quite simply, showcases the shattering emotionality of a mother's worst nightmare. Ariana Neal is wonderfully touching as a young girl whose whole world is about to be turned upside down. I must also commend the solid turns from Kevin Durand and Chad Michael Murray as the overeager officers whose paths unfortunately cross with Grant's own.

There are times I feel Coogler slackened his grip on the reins, though, and in a few instances I feel he foreshadows the film's conclusion so much that it almost distracts from what he's trying to show you. It's easy to see why, when the audience knows how the story will end, but Coogler could've eased up on the portents (the scene where Oscar cradles a dying dog is a good showcase of acting, but far too on-the-nose for my liking). But for the most part, he keeps a tight leash on much of the proceedings, allowing the story to play out with very little guidance. And at the end of it, the true power of Fruitvale Station is that the inevitable reactions you will feel won't be over a symbol or a saint. It's about a man who didn't deserve what happened to him. 9.5/10

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