One should know what to expect going in to Fruitvale Station. This is not an uplifting movie, but it should be noted that it’s not a particularly good one either. Dramas these days don’t seem to bother as much with characterization and dialogue as much as emotionally wrenching the audience, which can be good or bad-- in the case of Fruitvale Station, it’s a little of both. Even though the main character is very well-defined, the movie’s purpose is merely to make us feel attached to him, and then rip him away from us. It’s like giving a child a toy, and then taking it away five minutes later: The child isn’t any worse off than they were when they started, but they cry nonetheless. And this film works in the same way. Unless you form that attachment to the main character, the whole point of the movie will be for naught.
Fortunately, Michael B. Jordan brings enough to the table to ensure that even the most cold-hearted moviegoer will form that attachment. He stars as Oscar Grant, the man “accidentally” shot fatally in the back on New Years Day, 2009 in San Francisco. Now, a few quick things: As a resident of the Bay Area, I feel like I should say that everyone here remembers what happened that day, as the following week saw some of the worst riots in the history of San Francisco. However, that doesn’t excuse the fact that the movie has characters refer to the city as “Frisco.” I promise you this, no true resident of the Bay Area refers to San Francisco this way. Sure, it may be a minor beef, but little things like that make the movie feel jarringly inaccurate to Bay Area residents and destroys its quasi-realistic feel. Especially that one scene where Jordan walks from one side of the peninsula to the other in ten seconds... yeah...
Anyway, minor blips in reality aside, this still isn’t a very well-made movie. The camerawork is questionable at best, and there are a lot of annoying moments where the audio from one scene continues into the next in a pretentious echo effect, supposedly to make the movie feel deep, meaningful, and haunting. Techniques like this are fine once in a while, but when a movie piles them on this much, it runs the risk of being overly melodramatic. Fruitvale Station crosses that line and keeps on going well off into the distance. Its use of the actual footage from the night of the shooting is pointless, and is only there to drive the already obvious point home that yes, Jordan’s character is a great guy who was cut down mercilessly in the prime of his life and blah blah blah. I’m not saying it doesn’t tell a worthy story-- it does-- but it does it in such a way that the audience will be begging for some relief from the crushingly self-important vibe it gives off.
This movie goes through so much effort to show us that the main character is a great guy, you start to get tired of it. One scene has a dog get hit by a car, which of course gives him the chance to hold it close and talk softly to it while it dies. Another has him randomly help out a girl who needs to know how to fry a fish, just because he can. These scenes are not just random, they’re unrealistic-- There’s no reason for us to think that these things happened in real life. Half of the movie was probably dreamed up by the writers, who wanted more cloying sentimentality thrown in there. It makes me wonder what Oscar Grant’s real-life family thought of this movie.
The film compensates for some of its flaws, however, with a great central performance by Jordan. He displays emotions well, and is a very kinetic actor. He uses facial expressions and hand gestures to bring realism to his character, as do most of his co-stars. The film also gives the audience a little faith in humanity (before it’s eventually extinguished, of course) through the interactions between Jordan and the random people he comes across. One scene, in which he talks to a man about marriage and family in a chance meeting on the street, is oddly poetic. Again, there’s no reason to believe that such a thing actually happened, but I’d rather believe that it did and not come out of this movie completely depressed.
Final Score for Fruitvale Station: 6/10 stars. Certainly overrated but never boring, this is a powerful (perhaps too powerful) drama with a memorable lead performance and often-great dialogue. It gets lazy towards the end, finishing off with a typical “where are they now” montage of what happened after the events, but it’s a true story, so I can’t really fault it for that. But as a whole, the film never quite coheres. Sure, it’s one of the year’s better dramas, but it’s far from being the best.
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