Fruitvale Station, directed and written by Ryan Coogler, dramatizes the true story of 22-year-old Oscar Grant III, who was fatally shot in the back by a white police officer, Johannes Mehserle, at the eponymous BART station in Oakland, California on New Year’s Day 2009. The film opens up with actual cell phone footage caught by one of the many bystanders inside the train witnessing the mounting tension and heated commotion occurring on the railway platform between unarmed New Years revelers just trying to get home, and hotheaded cops roughing them up for no good reason just before Oscar is shot in the back. Coogler makes no illusions about how the film will end. Knowing the harrowing and inevitable outcome from the onset sets an awful sense of dread deep in the pit of our stomach. We know death awaits a young man’s life; a young man who woke up one day and didn’t know it would be his last. After watching the actual footage, the film regresses 24-hours before the shooting and follows Oscar’s life, sporadically intercut with point-of-view flashbacks of his past, as he lives out his final day leading up to his tragic death.
Coincidentally, Fruitvale Station opened on the same week as when George Zimmerman received a ‘not guilty’ verdict for shooting and killing 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, a coincidence that reinforces the fact that we are nowhere near a post-racial era even in an age where President Obama has been elected twice. Racial inequity plagues America like a disease because of stereotypes perpetuated by ignorance, fear, and the overwhelming distorted representation of African-Americans as criminals, drug dealers, or gang members by the media. Nonetheless, Coogler, who’s an Oakland native, has made a film that is free from political polemics. He does shed light on a prevalent social problem, but he does not try to answer why Mehserle shot Oscar Grant. Intention is not the focus of the film. Instead he poignantly and respectfully tells Oscar Grant’s story by allowing us to see him as a human being just like the rest of us, with all the good, bad, and ugly; a young man who had dreams, family and friends who loved him, and whose life was senselessly cut short.
Oscar, sensitively and exceptionally played by Michael B. Jordan, is no angel when we’re introduced to him. We learn he’s not completely responsible, has been fired for being chronically late for work, has cheated on his girlfriend, sells drugs, has an impulsive temper, and has served time at San Quentin prison. He’s human and he’s flawed, but on the flip side he’s also a doting and devoted father to a cute 4-year-old daughter named Tatiana, played by Ariana Neal, an adoring son to his mother Wanda, played by Octavia Spencer, and an overall caring, goodhearted, compassionate, and decent young man who even helps out his sister pay her rent when he doesn’t even have enough to pay his own.
Having absolutely no conception of his untimely death, Oscar goes about his day running errands to prepare for his mother’s birthday gathering with his extended family later that evening. One of his first stops is to buy crabs at the supermarket where he was recently fired from. In this scene we see Oscar trying to help a white woman who appears to be completely baffled by buying the right type of fish to fry. When Oscar offers to help her she quickly sizes him up and dismisses him by keeping her gaze fixed down on her cell phone while texting, as if he were a nuisance or derelict begging for money, hoping he’ll just go away. Nonetheless, Oscar’s goodhearted nature and charm persist until the woman softens up toward him and accepts his help. This plot point is one of the first attempts Coogler makes to show the undercurrent of racial divide. It’s there and it exists, but Coogler is not ramming a political message down our throats, he’s merely showing that Oscar is a good guy who likes to help others. In this scene we also see Oscar make a genuine plea to his former manager to get his job back. When the manager denies him a second chance, Oscar’s temper flares up, but he does come to realize that his irresponsibility of constantly coming to work late cost him his job. Nonetheless, with no job and bills and rent to pay, Oscar is desperate. Desperate times call for desperate measures, so he promptly calls a friend offering to sell him weed.
While waiting at a meeting spot for his friend to arrive, Oscar has a flashback of his mother visiting him in prison a year ago. For a few minutes we are subjectively placed in Oscar’s mind. Recalling this event from his past places him in a position of deep introspection where he realizes all the choices he’s made have not improved his life. During this visit, his mother Wanda serves a heaping mass of pure, unadulterated tough love. She tells Oscar that she will no longer come to visit him in prison. She’s tired of him constantly getting in trouble and setting a bad example for his daughter. Wanda reveals that Tatiana keeps wondering about why her daddy would rather be away on vacation than spend time with her. Finally she points out that his constant bad decisions are going to cost him the people he loves as she gets up and walks away, not looking back as several guards detain an angry and out of control Oscar. Deep in thought, the emotional and painful pang of his mother’s rejection snaps him back into the present where he realizes selling drugs is not a path he wants to follow anymore if the risk is losing his family. This is a pivotal moment when he realizes he has to change and atone for all his mistakes.
Coogler’s unflinching focus keeps us connected to Oscar. He casts our gaze at Oscar’s surroundings and inner struggles to survive and provide for his family in a low-income community that doesn’t really present him with opportunities to advance, but rather fruitless minimum wage jobs to toil in. By spending time with Oscar, we see him as any other human being who struggles in life; who has great potential, dreams and aspirations, but are harder to come by in the context of his social surroundings. What Coogler achieves by building the details of Oscar’s last day and keeping the focus on his humanity, is overturning the fear-mongering impressions swayed by the media. Coogler transforms the superficial impression of a statistic into a full-fledged human being; a human being whose potential was wasted and dreams were deferred because the only thing the BART officers who detained him saw was a black thug. So as we connect with Oscar throughout the film, Coogler simultaneously builds the portent of doom that leads us to the fatal shooting we saw in the beginning.
In the final act, Coogler recreates the fatal incident we witnessed on the grainy cell phone footage. Its gritty and chaotic portrayal occurs swiftly, demonstrating how 
rapidly racial profiling spins a situation out of control, leading cops to impulsively react with unwarranted aggression and hostility. Oscar’s life was cut way too short because of the hasty criminalization of his skin color. I’m not sure what the cure is for people who’ve been Clockwork Orange[d] into a life of racist fear and hatred, but what Coogler attempts to do in Fruitvale Station is break through the thick, opaque pane of stereotypes in order to clearly see Oscar as a man, father, boyfriend, brother and son who meant so much to many people, rather than a mere common thug and drug dealer. Coogler provides a powerful, emotional, and harrowing human story behind an impersonal headline. In the end, we’re heartbroken by the tragedy of a young man’s life cut short due to racist fear and hatred.
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