20 September,2013 03:22 PM IST | | Mihir Fadnavis
'Fruitvale Station' won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance this year, and it is quite obvious why. The film is not just well made but also an important one. It's also not a film as much as it is a heartfelt paean for the utter lack of justice in the world.
'Fruitvale Station'u00a0
On New Year's Eve 2009 America was shocked by an incident of police brutality against a young black man named Oscar Grant at a subway station in California. Onlookers whipped out their cell phones and videotaped the incident - the footage spread like wildfire and the ugly head of racism was paraded over the Internet. In 'Fruitvale Station' director Ryan Coogler recounts this incident with grit and a shade of tightly controlled anger.
Michael B Jordan, who appears in the television series 'The Wire' recreates Oscar with earnest charm and charisma, making him the sympathetic everyman without hogging the drama surrounding him. Director Coogler spends majority of the film going through the events that led to the tragedy. Throughout the film we meet Oscar's family and friends, his struggle to escape the shadow of his incarceration and deal with the lack of job offers. He is a flawed character, with bouts of selflessness followed by moments of violence and temper. And Jordan brings out those traits beautifully, his reactions are raw and real thus making us connect with his character. We know how things are going to pan out for him, but Jordan's establishment of his character's infirmity makes the incident at the station all the more wretched.
The inherent flaw of the film is that it relies too heavily on the assumption that the audience will already by familiar with Fruitvale. That might work in American theatres but most Indian audiences probably wouldn't be aware of the incident. It's a tiny, but important flaw, and Coogler tries to make up for it by including real archive footage in the narrative early on. What he does best, however, is he ascertains the racial overtones without sermonising on them. That makes 'Fruitvale Station' the anti-Crash, and a damn good film to boot.
