Fruitvale Station (***1/4)

I’m never sure whether knowing that a story in a movie is true should change my evaluation of it. And it is true that Oscar Grant (Michael B. Jordan) was shot by a Bay Area Rapid Transit officer on New Year’s Day, 2009. That scene begins the movie, but this isn’t a docudrama; it summarizes the aftermath of the shooting (trial, riots, protests) in an on-screen crawl at the end. Most of the story takes place in the preceding 24 hours and tells not of a killing, but of a 22-year-old Oakland man in transition. He is a loving father to a four-year-old girl, whose mother (Melonie Diaz) he has thoughts of marrying, and a loving son to his mother (Octavia Spencer), whom he thoughtfully texts on her birthday. But he’s also cheated on her and sold drugs. The new year will be a chance to make a start, but it is chance that puts him in harm’s way.

A movie about a character trying to change can seem trite if the character succeeds. The movie can make it seem too easy. An unhappy ending can seem fatalistic. If the ending here were fiction, it might seem melodramatic. Race and class are an obvious subtext to the killing, and certainly were central to how it was perceived, but the movie doesn’t make any direct statement about that. Instead, it’s structured in the way a mystery might be. What saves the ending from seeming like too much is not that it is true, but the way the events in the movie lead to Grant’s being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And the solid characterization by the writer-director, Ryan Coogler, making his feature debut.

IMDb link

viewed 9/4 7:20 pm at Ritz Bourse