Please contact us
with corrections
or breaking news
Fruitvale Station Opens to High Praise Nationwide by Doniphan Blair
'Fruitvale Station' sold out Oakland's prestigious Grand Lake Theater the day opened on July 12th. photo: D. Blair
"Fruitvale Station", a film about Oakland, shot in Oakland last summer, and directed by Ryan Coogler, a 27 year-old Oaklander, opened here, as well as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and three other cities, to great critical and audience acclaim on July 12th.
Even Hollywood was impressed. "Fruitvale Station", distributed by the Weinstein Company, "scored the weekend’s highest per-screen average of nearly $54,000 from seven locations, including the sold-out Grand Lake theater in Oakland, Calif.," noted Variety.
The lines around the block delighted Grand Lake management, which added extra shows. Although the Grand Lake is not a Landmark Theater, the chain contracted by the Weinsteins, Coogler pulled strings to place the film there because his mother lives nearby. "Fruitvale" expands to an additional half a dozen cities this Friday and goes fully nationwide on July 26th.
For this reviewer, as well as this magazine, which recently announced "The Stammer", a film movement highlighting complex, ambiguous and genre-blending films from Oakland and elsewhere, it is a dream come true, an almost unalloyed masterpiece.
The credit goes to prodigy director Coogler, who also wrote the screenplay. It concerns the actual killing of a 22 year-old Oaklander, Oscar Grant, at the eponymous BART station by one of its cops, and it beautifully blends documentary and Chekhovian dramaturge. Score one for Stammering.
In addition, "Fruitvale" ably integrated indie and Hollywood assets and styles. "Fruitvale" was executive produced by Forest Whitaker, the intense character actor as well as director who appears to be mentoring Coogler, a recent graduate of USC's prestigious film school. And it stars the excellent Michael B. Jordan of " Friday Night Lights" and "Wire" fame and Octavia Spencer, who took a Supporting Actress Oscar in "The Help" (2011), as Oscar and his mom respectively.
'Fruitvale' director Ryan Coogler and cinematographer Rachel Morrison who gave the film its astoundingly edgy look. photo: Mark Davis, courtesy gettyimages
Nevertheless, "Fruitvale"'s aggressive cinematography by Rachel Morrison shows it stands beyond the grip of puerile Hollywood production values. Although she has done typical TV shows and another feature ("The Hills", 2008-9, and the rather routine "Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie", 2012, respectively), if she wasn't shooting a single lens reflex camera, the standard axe of budget filmmakers worldwide as well as in Oakland, the film sure looks like it.
Morrison's sometimes wild handheld camera, her whipsaw focus pulls and Coogler's inclusion of them in the final cut were big tips of the hat to cutting-edge indies. Score two for Stammering.
"Fruitvale" got some unintended publicity, coming out on the day of the biased acquittal in the Trayvon Martin killing case, which triggered demonstrations in Oakland. But Oaklanders were already eager to see the film and would have come out in droves, regardless. It certainly seemed like half my friends did.
"I thought he did a great job, since it all leads up to the end," noted Carmen Madden, the Oakland director/writer/producer of the incisive and polished feature, "Everyday Black Man" (2009), whom I happened to meet on the around-the-block line. "You know what is going to happen but the emotion of that was excellent."
While some viewers wondered why "Fruitvale" didn't name the man who killed Grant—BART policeman Johannes Mehserle awarded two years for manslaughter although he served only 11 months—not even noting him in the credits, Madden said, "I think it was smarter not to highlight the Mehserle character. It is more of the system—so you're a not raging against one guy—it is the system that did it. They did a good job of portraying the Oakland."
The crowd at the opening of 'Fruitvale' was very 'Oakland', ie mixed, multicultural and with some activists leafletting. photo: D. Blair
Indeed, Coogler did. Instead of spotlighting murder, mayhem and Machiavellian gangbangers, as some filmmakers see Oakland (and one part of it is), "Fruitvale" shows the easy interaction of Oaklanders of all classes and races as well as the easy access to nature, one scene doing both: when Oscar meets an Asian dealer friend at a beautiful San Francisco Bay jetty. Score three for Stammering.
Although Coogler opens with the actual cell phone video footage, which both blows up nicely and sets the stage tragically, he achieves high drama through a script laced with intricate oppositioning and prefiguring. I would be interested to know how close it hewed to fact but, given the Grant family approved the script, we can assume Cogler's investigation of Grant's foibles must have been fairly realistic.
They include cheating on his girlfriend, habitual lateness (which cost him his job), issuing the occasional threat and dealing "trees", as he codes marijuana. But those peccadilloes also serve to highlight his spiritual struggles and his rich relationships with the females in his life: the aforementioned Latina girlfriend, very well rendered by Melonie Diaz, his beloved daughter, whom he dotes on (also excellently acted by Ariana Neal) as well as his mother. Like Walt Whitman, Oscar contradicted himself—score four for Stammering.
Moreover, Coogler was channeling great Chekhov, with many little and a few big guns discretely placed on the proverbial the mantle piece. Despite the almost universal knowledge of the outcome of a story that has been in the papers almost since it hit, on January first 2009, he creates drama by salting in many possible outcomes for the big day: New Year's eve, one of the most iconic of our calendar year, a day of resolutions, which Oscar elegantly made. It also happened to be Oscar's mother's birthday.
Although Oscar (Michael B. Jordan) enjoys many light moments with daughter Tatiana (Ariana Neal), she worried for his safety. photo: courtesy R. Coogler
Indeed, that relationship was the crux of the film. The toughest moment is when Jordan and Spencer pull no punches and go down swinging to the emotional mat, right in the visitor's room at San Quentin Prison (where Oscar was incarcerated for dealing). As if that weren't enough, the scene included a brief but vicious interaction with a tattooed, Aryan Brotherhood-type, which, like so much in the film, comes to greater significance later.
Indeed, Coogler threads in subtle foreknowledge and severe past references from the very beginning of the movie which opens with Oscar's girlfriend raking him over the coals for infidelities, to the end when she's glaring at him chatting up a white woman acquaintance, on the same BART train hurtling towards its predestined conflagration. Throughout the film, the BART is shown cutting ominously through Oakland.
Although this reviewer has not been able to confirm the verisimilitude of Grant's qualities, the inclusion of complexity makes for better drama. The only thing missing to elevate "Fruitvale" to full Greek tragedy would have been to make the Mehserle character somewhat sympathetic, under intense pressure from both his aggressive superior and the craziness of trying to arrest people on New Year's Eve in the heart of East Oakland. But that might have been a bridge to far for Coogler's core audience.
Oscar is confronted by the cops in a showdown that seemed to inadvertently escalate from a subway fight to harsh cop-kid standoff and then tragic killing. photo: courtesy R. Coogler
Although the largely black but fully-Oakland and mixed audience laughed at many of the inside black jokes laced throughout the film, afterwards, I heard a couple of young men outside wondering whether the actual Oscar Grant would have tended to a run-over dog in the middle of the street, as his cinematic doppleganger does.
It's a testament to Coogler's vision that he pushed his actors to emote through the intricacy of his story. And they were flawless, from Jordan's subtle lip-movements as he chews over the endless conundrums facing him, to Octavia Spencer, Melonie Diaz and Ariana Neal, or his homies, his grandma or the pregnant woman whom he helps find a bathroom on New Year's Eve. Her loving husband, it turns out, was a credit card fraudster, yet another reference to the complexity of crime and its committers.
Although most of the film's crew was from Los Angeles, it did include some casting by local Nina Henninger, line production by Richard "Rick" Bosner and a few others. But the bottomline is it stars Oakland as an icon for complexity and confusion but also for rising above and doing the right thing, regardless of the horrors hammering down—score another for Stammering.
Most of all, "Fruitvale" is a testament to Coogler, the auteur writer/director who put it all together and left in the historical record a mature foretelling and backfeeling drama, a fitting epitaph for Grant. At the precocious age of 27, only five years Grant's senior, "Fruitvale" promises much more from Coogler, hopefully including—as was suggested in the Variety article—an Academy Award, which are of course nicknamed "Oscar"..