Shortly after midnight on January 1, 2009, Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old African American, was shot by a BART transit police officer in Oakland, California; he died a few hours later in the hospital. Grant, who was unarmed, was returning home from New Year's Eve celebrations in San Francisco. This real-life tale, which in of itself was a hot bed of instant news-making-- the event was captured by many a civilian cell-phones at the time it happened-- re-surged it's case for urgency and immediacy in wake of the recent events and subsequent trail of George Zimmerman. The film which posits the last twenty-four hours in the life of Oscar Grant is the focus of
Fruitvale Station, Ryan Coogler's alert debut feature won both the Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award at this years Sundance Film Festival. Neither filmmaker, nor distributor (in this case, The Weinstein Company) could have known that the Zimmerman events (a case of another young and unarmed African American) would have coincided at the very same time. It may seem a bit cynical to note, but it gives
Fruitvale Station that unexpected glimmer of urgency that it may not have otherwise possessed.
Not that the film itself isn't a well calibrated movie. Coogler, a youngster, aged twenty-seven, exhibits a clear-eyed expressiveness in telling his tale, an authority and a clarity that's for the most part devoid of earnestness and easy reductions. His greatest asset exhibited in
Fruitvale Station is in his view of Oscar himself, taking a harder to trod, more difficult assertion of raw humanity rather than painting the young man as saint nearing martyrdom. It's in his unflinching presentation of man over issue that keeps the film fresh and nearly always above the surface. We learn throughout that Oscar spent the New Years holiday a few years earlier incarcerated; Coogler neither judges nor dismisses.
