FRUITVALE STATION (Ryan Coogler) Rating: NNNN
A remarkable feature debut for writer/director Ryan Coogler, Fruitvale Station recreates the last day in the life of Oscar Grant before his death at the hands of a Bay Area Rapid Transit cop early on New Year’s Day 2009.
Played winningly by Chronicle’s Michael B. Jordan as an instinctively helpful person actively trying to put a troubled past behind him, Grant is allowed to be a complex, multi-faceted individual. He’s an imperfect son, boyfriend and father who came to a violent, unnecessary end because of a combination of factors – America’s institutional racism looming pretty large among them.
Coogler’s film is less the portrait of a martyr than a three-dimensional study of a man and the people he left behind (nicely embodied by Melonie Diaz and Octavia Spencer as Oscar’s girlfriend and mother).
The fact that Fruitvale Station arrives on the heels of the George Zimmerman verdict just drives his point home all the more brutally.
