8) Fruitvale Station
It’s not just historical injustice that can rile the senses, but acts of senselessness from the recent past as well. While Fruitvale Station tries to get as many details of its story correct, there are embellishments and hypothetical situations meant to drum up a certain kind of sympathy for our fateful protagonist, Oscar Grant. The hypotheticals may veer into the territory of the farfetched for some, but I would guard against the notion that they paint a rose-colored portrait of Grant during his final day. Doing so would have turned the story into a weird elegiac one, but the impression that the events depicted either did happen or could have happened make the movie extremely powerful and moving.
There’s a contemporary powerlessness to Fruitvale Station that is both heartbreaking and maddening. It depicts the difficulty in escaping the culture you’re born into, the challenge of learning to cope with emotions in a manner other than the violent outbursts you’ve adopted from your environment, and the randomness that can unfold when fear takes center stage. Determinism and free will are part of the picture here, with the extent to which we write our own outcomes being complicated by factors that seem to be in motion long before we ever existed. The film establishes a sense of inevitability from the beginning, and that serves to make the entire experience of Fruitvale Station and Oscar Grant’s life such a devastating story.
