As Ryan Coogler says to interviewer
Elvis Mitchell, on “The Treatment,” the idea is to show Oscar Grant as a whole
person through the perspectives of those who he cared about—his mother,
girlfriend, daughter, and friends. The 22 year-old African American man was
many things to many people, and the fact that he did not make it through that
night—New Year’s Eve of 2008—is a tragedy we experience intimately as viewers.
But this is more than about Grant. It is about all Black men, how once they are
arrested and taken to prison, often their lives are over.
The setting of the Bay Area is done
realistically with a hand-held camera. In fact, it is hauntingly real for
someone such as myself who grew up in the Richmond in a racially mixed
neighborhood in the 1960s and has lived here her whole life. And doubly so for
someone who teaches at Laney College in the heart of Oakland. Coogler’s hard
and straight-forward camera style puts us directly in Grant’s viewpoint, seeing
San Francisco from the Oakland side, the “mean” streets of Oakland as Oscar drives
with the music turned up, the setting of a Bart train coming in from West
Oakland, making the curve, and diving down underground towards Lake Merritt—it
is all familiar. And in that, a local viewer is drawn in implicitly, in the
sense that we are part of the tension—the East Bay/Bay Area effort to mix and
integrate races and cultures amid the racial tension experienced every day.
Coogler shows us the best of the Bay and the worst of the Bay. And whether we
live here or not, we all become Oscar.
What makes this a work of art
rather than a documentary needs to be stated. Coogler accessed court documents
and cell phone footage of the shooting, had interviews with Grant’s family and
friends. Fictionalized details mix with pieces from the actual day, and the
effect is that the elements of good storytelling do not detract from actual
events, but instead, build on them. More than the movie trailer shows, this
story is not just about the death of Grant, but it is about the mundane events
in a day—events which show character and reveal possible points of change.
The one flashback in this film,
which the film maker uses to tie together some incidents later on, goes back five
years earlier to Oscar’s incarceration in prison. Present day New Year’s Eve,
he sits at the water’s edge in Oakland, looking across to San Francisco, a
significant day in several ways. Square chunks of concrete jut out instead of
rocks near the shore, evoking the East Bay’s industrial past. He remembers his
mother’s visit to prison on New Year’s Eve, her birthday. Before coming into
the prison visiting room, Oscar has to bend over naked, is searched everywhere,
and finally, when he sits down across from his mother, he muses about life
outside prison, deflecting her question of “What’s that on your face?”
referring to the bruise below his right eye, a small shiner. She tries to get
him to admit his guilt towards abandoning his girlfriend, and more importantly,
his daughter, by being in prison. She holds him accountable. Finally,
exasperated, she says it’s her last visit, and walks away down the hall, as
guards restrain a shouting Oscar, upset because she would not hug him goodbye.
After the flashback, we are with
Oscar again at the Bay, as he now stands above the water. He takes out the big
bag of weed he has stashed under his shirt and pants, his belt holding it in,
and turns it upside down and shakes it into the Bay. Clearly a turnaround for
someone dealing drugs. Yes, he has lost his job at Farmer Joe’s grocery store.
Yes, he feels like a disappointment to his girlfriend, who he admittedly
cheated on, and to his mother and even grandmother, both who remind him of
little things—don’t use your cell phone
while driving, don’t call me while you’re working. He is trying to get it
together, but it’s hard. He is playful with his daughter, and wants to please
everyone, but he has an image to uphold with his friends, where he is expected
to step up and be tough. It’s a tall order. He is just a person.
While the rest of the film is
chronological, like many films it opens with frame of the end. In this case, it is from the perspective of a cell phone camera, the footage taken by someone
standing inside the Bart train, capturing the activity on the Fruitvale station
Bart platform. The cell phone wobbles and shakes, as the car is crowded. In the
background we can hear rushes of sound, the horror of the crowd as the scene
mounts. Then, the film cuts to the beginning of the day.
This is a single day-in-the-life,
the last day of Oscar Grant, from the domestic early morning with his
girlfriend and daughter, to Oscar’s dropping his daughter at day care and his
girlfriend at her blue collar job, and all the hours in the day he spends
driving around. He gets gas, yells at a car speeding away after running over a
dog, and holds the dog in his arms as it bleeds to death. He shops for crabs
for his mother’s birthday dinner, and we experience that family celebration in
lingering shots, from the dinner preparation to the washing up. We see the Bart
ride out to the City with Oscar’s friends and girlfriend, the partying on Bart
with East Bay folks of different ethnicities—the best of the Bay—and the ride
back. There, mayhem comes when a man from Oscar’s prison time recognizes him
and they lay into each other among the tightly peopled car. The Bart police
arrive.
The train is stopped at Fruitvale,
but the story is not halted. It moves painfully forward in a final long camera shot,
this one taking its time, through Oscar’s and his friends’ experiences, sitting
down on the Bart platform, then pushed, struggling, asking the officers what
they are being arrested for, handcuffs, the “nigger-bitch” name calling by one
Bart Police officer to Oscar’ inciting Oscar’s temper. Oscar pushed face down
on the pavement and held there with the officer’s knee to his throat. The gun
shot. The look on Oscar’s face of rotten disbelief. The look on the cop’s face,
as he tries to cuff him, senselessly.
Cut to Oscar’s girlfriend
downstairs outside the Bart gates hearing the shot, screaming. When Oscar’s
friends come down cuffed, led by officers, she yells “Why don’t you tell me
what is going on?” A stretcher appears and is hauled up the escalator. Then it
comes down with her man on it, bloodied. The ambulance takes off leaving her
there. She calls Oscar’s mother, who says, “I’ll come get you,” and they go to
Highland hospital, where they learn the external bleeding has been stopped, but
the internal bleeding continues. Family and friends gather in the waiting room,
pray in a circle. We are praying too, and even though we know the end result,
know he will die, we pray because we are invested in this.
When his mother is escorted to her
son’s body, she has no choice but to stand gazing through the window at him. It’s
a homicide case, she is told. She cannot hug him. We remember how she left him
that day in prison five years ago, their differences large. We understand her
guilt, her regret. It’s not her fault. We can only be devastated. Torn apart. When
he dies, we lose someone we have come to sympathize with and see from the
inside. He is not a hero, but just another young Black man who has been in
prison, and now, years later, has died from a gun shot wound inflicted by a
White man. Whose fault is it? What can we do to stop it?
