Fruitvale Station (2013) - Who's To Blame?

★★★★☆

It opens with a real footage recorded by a passenger on a subway platform, showing white cops asking several black guys to behave and cooperate for what I don’t know yet. After some bickering, one of the black is forced face down on the ground by two police officers. And it ends with a gunshot.

‘Fruitvale Station’ tells a true story that shocks, provokes and moves. The footage works like an intrigue. The rest of it reveals moments of the victim, Oscar Grant’s (Michael B. Jordan) day life before he finally walks up to such a tragedy. We get to catch glimpses of how he struggles to make ends meet, and gets caught once; how he copes with his mother, girlfriend and daughter, but inevitably goes off sometimes under pressure of trying to be a better man like every ordinary one of us. The images are poignant in a sense, as you know the ending’s not gonna be happy. The underscore is exceedingly haunting. It attacks me from time to time.

Everything happens for a reason. I don’t feel like the police are all to blame for such a tragedy. Did the police officer who shot Oscar really mistake his gun for a taser? Or did he do it because he had a problem with the black? Maybe, maybe not, but one thing for sure, if only Oscar and his fellows had kept their head down a bit, and the police had managed to hold their horses, none of this would’ve happened. Those who prefer labeling or being labeled are the real cause of it. So would Oscar Grant’s unfair and unfortunate death stop such a horrible thing from happening ever again? I don’t think so! We can't live without labels, can we?

This film reminds me of ‘41 Shots’, a very powerful song by Bruce Springsteen, inspired by ‘the Shooting of Amadou Diallo’, a young black kid from Guinea who got brutally shot 41 times by 4 white cops out on the street, and died on the scene. The lyrics are sad and impressive: ‘you can get killed just for living in your American skin’. Well, I guess it’s not the American or the non-American, or the black and white, or the rich and poor that we should worry about, because they’re all just labels. The crux of the problem is our strong delusions, distinctions and attachments. No, tragedies like that can never stop until the day we’re free from the labels that we tend to put on ourselves and others!