“Fruitvale Station” is the Most Important Movie You’ll See This Year, Maybe Ever Posted by Nathan S. on 08/05/13 | Filed under Opinion, Movies

In my lifetime there have only been a small handful of Stay Seated movies. The movie ends, the credits roll, and no one moves. No one even really talks. A collective blanket of "I'm going to need some time to process what I just saw" weighs everyone down, keeps them pined to their seats. The credits end, the theater lights go up, and half the audience are still in their seats. It happened when I saw "Schindlers List", it happened when I saw "Memento" and it happened when I saw "Fruitvale Station" this weekend.

First, the facts. In a case that would in some ways eerily foreshadow Trayvon Martin's death years later, on New Year's Day 2009, Oscar Grant, an unarmed 22-year-old Oakland man, was detained and shot while handcuffed by police. During the ensuing trial the defense attempted to portray Grant as a "thug" and the shooting as an accident, a legal strategy that would lead to an involuntary manslaughter conviction and 11 months in jail for the officer who shot him, as well as a wave of protests and riots.

Those are the facts, but "Fruitvale Station" isn't particularly concerned with the facts. This isn't a police procedural like "Law & Order" or "CSI", it's goal isn't to "solve" a crime. Instead, it's goal is to humanize Oscar Grant, and by extension everyone struggling to remain human against the weight of a dehumanizing society (particularly young black men), and on that level it succeeds staggeringly well.



Grant was a man who had served jail time, and was an adoring father. A man who was determined to better his his family's life with a legal job, and then squandered his best chance at that legal job. A man who possessed a hair-trigger temper, who was not afraid of violence, and shopped for the perfect Hallmark card for his mother's birthday. It's that human complexity that the police fatally denied him, that a media and public obsessed with simply delineated hero or villain storylines denied him, and to whatever extent possible "Fruitvale Station" gives him back.

Watching this movie isn't pleasant, it isn't enjoyable. Honestly, as a father myself, watching the scenes of Grant with his daughter, knowing that she'd soon be fatherless, were emotionally brutal. But instead "Fruitvale Station" offers something more valuable than enjoyment. It offers a chance to connect, to realize that we are more like Oscar Grant than we had imagined. One twist of fate, to perhaps be born in a different city, of a different race, to be the one handcuffed when a cop "mistakes" his Taser for a gun, and it'd be us bleeding on the cold concrete of that train station, praying to see your daughter one more time.

So for whatever my recommendation is worth, see "Fruitvale Station". Just see it. Watch it, and after the movie ends, don't move. Just stay seated.

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