Whether it’s opting to help a complete stranger embark on a culinary adventure by phoning his grandmother to offer them advice to letting the lessons of past mistakes finally sink in to keep from selling a bag of weed despite financial obligations, Oscar finds himself tested on a number of levels during the course of a very important day.
Fruitvale station dvd full#
Unwilling to emphasize the tragedy, Frutivale Station’s celebration of life serves as a lesson to all of us to cherish the here and now that’s so naturalistic that we’re not even aware of its power in a way that flies in the face of The Butler style pomp and circumstance filmmaking.Ĭhallenging the idea that we must wait a full day or even – as the film would ironically hinge the most fateful changes on – a New Year to change our life, over the course of a long day, Oscar proves that we can always venture down a new path to start a new journey by any number of choices we make. Managing to transcend what in someone else’s hands could’ve been a far too melancholic and heavy-handed film, Coogler (who also wrote Fruitvale) has achieved an impressive feat by producing a deceptively simplistic yet overwhelmingly powerful film that leaves an even greater impression on viewers after we press eject and have time to reflect on its significance for our lives. And this phenomenon (along with many other ones with which we can instinctively identify) are all chronicled in this modern work that recalls Agnes Varda’s French New Wave classic Cleo From 5 to 7. Instead of dwelling on the senseless nature of Oscar Grant’s death and the questionable handling of events that would follow in the upsetting judicial aftermath of an obvious case of racial profiling (made that much timelier in its theatrical release which coincided with the Trayvon Martin verdict), Coogler sets the clock back twenty-four hours to show what a difference a day makes.Ī beautiful thought-provoking work of cinematic portraiture that focuses on the most otherwise mundane, monotonous aspects of life from driving to shopping to haunting effect, Frutivale makes us feel the weight of Grant’s future loss as more than just an anonymous name on the evening news by showing us the amount of love that exists in his large circle of friends and family.Īnd the multitude of interactions Grant has over the course of a day reveal a number of different sides of the exact same man in a way that’s relatable and authentically true to life as everybody experiences and relates to a person in a slightly different way than anyone else. In Fruitvale, Coogler takes a docudrama/neorealist approach to tell the fact-based tale of twenty-two year old California father who was gunned down in a gross miscarriage of justice under heightened circumstances in the wee small hours of New Year’s Eve 2009 morning by a flustered BART officer running on adrenaline and fear.Īnd although it opens with the horrific cell phone video documented footage of the actual shooting, Coogler has much more on his mind than that one awful snapshot that ushered in the end of a man’s life.
The pop culture mantra to take life one day at a time provides both the framework and the thesis of filmmaker Ryan Coogler’s deeply felt feature debut Fruitvale Station, which nonetheless winds up getting smashed to pieces in its arresting eighty-five minute running time.
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