Fruitvale Station: Oscar Grant killing
2013Gaetana Caldwell-Smith 2013-09Read it in the scan (PDF at ETOL), page 10 →
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10 SOCIALIST ACTION SEPTEMBER 2013 “Fruitvale Station.” Directed by Ryan Coogler; star ring Michael B. Jordan, Olivia Spencer, and Melonie Diaz “Fruitvale Station” is filmmaker and director Ryan Coogler’s first work and is as polished as any sea soned Hollywood filmmaker’s. He opens his film with the authentic, jumpy, low resolution of the cell-phone videos taken by passengers of the killing of Oscar Grant III by a BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) police officer that early New Year’s morning. Towards the end, Coogler recreates the scene fictionally, capturing the verisimilitude of the original.
“Fruitvale Station” is a docu-drama, a fictional ized account of Grant’s murder on Jan. 1, 2009, by BART cop Johannes Mehserle (whose identity is not revealed in the film). The film shows him shooting Grant in the back as he lay prone and handcuffed on the platform of Oakland’s Fruitvale BART station.
Grant is played by Michael B. Jordan, who has Den zel Washington’s charm and winning smile. He, his girlfriend Sophina (Melonie Diaz) and mother of his four-year-old daughter, Tatiana (a delightful, natural Ariana Neal), and their friends were on their way home on a BART train from the New Year’s Eve fire works in San Francisco. An altercation broke out, and while the train was stopped at Fruitvale Station, BART police arrived and ordered Grant and his friends off the train. What followed was a brutal attack along with undue harassment and beating by the cops on innocent people, which ended with Grant’s death.
Grant insisted that they weren’t doing anything. The audience in the theater, including me, involun tarily gasped and cried out in disbelief when the shot was heard that killed Grant, even though we knew the outcome. The camera stayed on Grant’s face as it registered his confusion. You felt him thinking, “This can’t be happening.”
Though we saw the scene captured by cell phone at the beginning of the film, Coogler’s recreation of it towards the end has more impact in that he allowed us to get to know Grant during the 24 hours before he was killed. Heartbreaking. We see him with Sophina,
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