Fruitvale Station (2013)

WARNING: I suppose you could say there are spoilers in this review, but I assume most of you know how this one ends. The movie essentially tells you where it's going up front. I do try to avoid specifics about what happens, but it's up to you.

It’s been said a million times before, but one of the great challenges of making a film based on real events is that it’s awful hard to create suspense when everybody knows the ending. There are a couple routes a filmmaker to go to fix this. They can go the Argo route and throw in a lot of old-school Hollywood suspense, or they can go the Zero Dark Thirty route and focus on the process instead of the payoff. And then there is Fruitvale Station, which begins with real-world footage of its central tragedy, and then goes backwards in time about 24 hours and forces us to watch as our protagonist unknowingly approaches his own abrupt demise. This is a potentially powerful device, and writer/director Ryan Coogler is occasionally able to get some great moments out of it, but he’s usually a bit too eager to resort to audience manipulation. The film’s depiction of the climactic incident and its aftermath is terrific, and it just about makes the whole ordeal worth the price of admission. It’s unfortunate that before it happens, Coogler’s string-pulling is a bit too blatant to be wholly effective.

Oscar Grant (the always great Michael B. Jordan) is a 22-year-old father who is trying to get his life back on track after a stint in prison. This involves mending relationships with his mother (Octavia Spencer) and girlfriend (Melonie Diaz), and looking to get his job back at the local grocery store. He’s having a rough go of it, but Coogler goes out of his way to show the audience just how big-hearted his protagonist is. It’s New Year’s Eve 2008, it’s his mother’s birthday, and he’s preparing to go downtown to San Francisco to celebrate the arrival of 2009. The night goes great for a while, but then tragedy arrives when he and his friends board a BART train to try and get back home.

It’s a horrendous story, and I have no problem with the movie taking a pro-Grant stance. In my mind, it’s the only stance to take, but the way Coogler handles the last day of his life almost cheapens his story more than it brings it to life. Specifically, the film throws so many ironies and brutally convenient touches at the audience that the whole enterprise feels rigged. Fruitvale Station is a film about a promising life that was cut short by forces beyond its control, but Coogler tries to impose emotions on us rather than let us watch the movie and react naturally. Because of the way he starts the movie, and because it’s based on a reasonably well-known true story, most everyone knows how it’s going to end. There’s some fascinating ambiguities to be explored, but Coogler will have none of it. His movie is all about Grant, how he was working to become a better man, and how tragic it is that he died. There’s no disputing that his death is tragic, but Fruitvale Station too readily skips along the surface when it should be diving deeper.

That said, the film is redeemed by the execution of the tragedy itself, which provides a glimpse of the great drama Fruitvale Station could have been. Once it kicks into gear, Coogler throws much of the deck-stacking that came before out the window and focuses on the present moment. He’s very good at that, and the energy and intensity of the final act is admirable. It’s a testament to this finale that when the movie finally ended, I actually wanted it to keep going. I wanted to see the ramifications of the incident, and the debate that occurred around the event itself. Instead, much of that is relegated to the epilogue, which throws text on the screen and follows it up with compelling documentary footage. As good as it is, it ultimately reveals the flaws of all that came before. The content of the final act is more compelling and thematically rich than the doom-filled “day in the life” stuff of the first two. The end may justify the enterprise as a whole, but it also underlines the idea that Coogler may have been pointing his camera in the wrong direction.

Grade: B-