The Whole Person: “Fruitvale Station” by Ryan Coogler (beware Spoiler alert!)

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?