What Happens When People Stop Being Polite
During the Trayvon Martin trial, one of the (many) points of debate brought up by the American public, if not by the attorneys themselves, was who exactly Trayvon Martin was. Conservatives argued that he was a large and intimidating presence, 6’2”, 175 lbs., covered in tattoos, a thug who spent his free time flipping off his webcam. Liberals countered that in fact Trayvon Martin was a skinny kid, 158 lbs., 5’11”, a child who liked to snack on iced tea and Skittles. Famously, even Trayvon Martin’s clothing came under debate as people wondered whether a hoodie marks you out as a “menace.” It was an ugly debate that both sides were scarily wrong about, because underneath the whole argument was the implicit idea that if one side could prove how flawed Martin was (or was not) as a person, then that would somehow answer whether George Zimmerman had the right to shoot him. The question Fruitvale Station poses is, why does that make a difference?
Fruitvale Station tells the story of the last twenty-four hours in Oscar Grant’s life. Grant was of course the young man who was shot and killed by a police officer after an altercation on the San Francisco BART, the video of which went viral on New Year’s Day 2009. Since then, all manner of protests and public outcry has occurred in the name of Oscar Grant, in the same way that they do after many police brutality cases. But what Fruitvale Station does is to keep Oscar Grant from being merely a symbol or a talking point, and turns him into a human—which is exactly what’s needed in these cases to really convince people of the severity of the problem in the first place.
As a result, you kind of have to view the film through two different lenses. On the one hand, you have to consider how it works as social commentary, and on the other, you have to consider how it works as a compelling drama. It can’t be both (lest it move into movie-of-the-week territory) and the film knows it, so one of the interesting things is to sit and watch to find out which one director Ryan Coogler will settle on. Luckily, the two choices are in lock-step with each other nearly the whole way through, which is one of the most admirable things about it. It opens with the aforementioned video footage, and no matter how many times you’ve watched it, I promise you, seeing it on the big screen, where everything is much clearer and the sound is crisp and there’s zero doubt what’s going on, is a shock. From there we enter into New Year’s Eve at 12:30 in the morning, as Grant (Michael B. Jordan) and his girlfriend Sophina (Melonie Diaz) lie in bed and argue with each other (lovingly) about Oscar’s recent infidelity.
It’s a bold way to start the film, because you expect a heated topic like the Oscar Grant shooting to handle its subject with kid gloves, or to bolster him up as a hero. But Grant was a troubled young man trying to make good—all reports of him say so—and the film’s goal is to present him to you, flaws and all. He’d been incarcerated several times before the arrest on the BART, he’d dealt (and was still dealing, by all accounts) drugs, he had a famously short fuse, he was wearing a hoodie—does that mean the police had a right to shoot him? Does any of that information change your opinion of the man? Why?
But there I go again, looking at the film as social commentary rather than cinema, when to the film’s credit it resists being a Message Piece for 80 of its 85 minutes. As a film, it’s tremendously impressive. It somehow manages to be both gripping (I couldn’t take my eyes off of it) and patient at the same time. Scenes unfold organically, as when Oscar picks his girlfriend and daughter up at the end of the day, or he makes phone calls about Mom’s birthday card, or the family prays around dinner and washes dishes. It wants to show the mundanity of Grant’s life in order for us to recognize who he was, and also to expose a general audience to a kind of person very rarely seen in films. The mundanity is punctuated by tense scenes wherein we’re exposed to Grant’s anger, which seemed at all times to be bubbling just beneath the surface. Grant was a charmer (and Michael B. Jordan is seriously, seriously the best actor of the year, no matter what else comes out), as we see for instance in a scene where he helps a girl pick out some fish at the market. (In fact, consider that scene as an example of the two kinds of viewing you need that I mentioned above; as cinema it works because the dialogue is razor sharp, teetering on the edge of Grant’s tendency to flirt too much, and as social commentary it works because the girl he’s speaking with is white, and we’re seeing an example of how Grant interacts with another kind of person). But in that same scene, mere seconds after helping her, he threatens his old boss in an effort to get his job back, and we understand how frustration can turn to anger, and how authority figures treat him, and how he treats them.
Shots resonate, particularly when everyone gets on the train on that fatal night, and rather than filming them getting on, we linger on a shot of the doors closing (sealing their fate, they’ll never re-enter the real world, and also showing how identity-less passengers on a train become as part of a crowd). Coogler the director does wise things like not actually showing the shooting itself (holding with an XCU of Grant’s stunned face instead) so that the exact nature of it remains ambiguous, and Coogler the writer peppers the whole thing with moments of genuine human connection and kindness. The police shot Grant because they refused to see him as a person, just as a thug, and Coogler suggests (through the public-bathroom scene, the girl-in-the-market, the dog especially) that with something as powerful and simple as empathy, we could probably avoid tragedies like Oscar Grant’s shooting from now on.
*SPOILER ALERT* Unfortunately, in the end, social commentary wins the battle, and the last few minutes (nearly) undo the brilliance of what came before. Coogler’s a first time director, and his lack of confidence shows in something like e.g. Octavia Spencer (as Grant’s mother) saying “I told him to take the train,” as she looks at her son’s body—but we saw her suggest that earlier, so why not trust us to recognize how that will haunt her forever? Likewise, Grant’s daughter is used as a prop, a mainstay in the early scenes to establish that she exists, then all but dropped from the film completely until she’s needed to evoke sympathy at the end (the final shot and the last line of dialogue are so out of place with the fluid sophistication of the rest of it—turning Grant back into a faceless Victim through manipulative tactics [“Where’s daddy?”]—that it feels like it was done by a completely different director).
But I guess I can’t really fault the film for wanting to make a commentary on a social injustice so sorely in need of comment. Obviously Oscar Grant is a more familiar name to a mass audience than, say, Eleanor Bumpurs, but Grant’s murder got way less coverage than Trayvon Martin’s ever did, and it’s hard, after watching the film, not to come to the conclusion that this country is not only unforgiving of flawed human beings with rocky pasts, but, if they’re black, we barely even acknowledge them at all.