Fruitvale Station Character Analysis

Fruitvale Station is based on a true story that occurred in Oakland, California in 2009. Oscar Grant III was unarmed and lying face down on a subway platform. He was shot by a white Bay Area Rapid Transit Police Officer. This movie is about what we can imagine when we cast our gaze across the longstanding divides in this segregated American society. Oscar Grant was a real 22 - year old man. The first thing we see in “Fruitvale” is the fatal moment that led to Oscar’s death. Camera phone footage of the Bay Area Rapid Transit cops beating Oscar and his friends on a subway platform that ends with a gunshot. The film dramatizes what Oscar was like up to the day before he was killed, New Years Eve 2009. Oscar was not at all an animal. He

Not sure what it is that is giving him that feeling, he decides it’s a sign that he needs to get a head start on his New Year resolutions: being a better son to his mother, who’s birthday just so happens to fall on New Year’s Eve, being a better partner to his girlfriend and mother of his child Sophina, who hasn’t been completely honest lately, and being a better father to Tatiana, his beautiful four – year old daughter. Crossing paths with friends, family, and strangers, his day starts out well. As the day goes on, he realizes that change really isn’t going to come easy for him. His resolution, however, takes a tragic turn when BART officers shoot him in cold blood at the Fruitvale subway stop on New Years Day. Oscar’s life and tragic death would shake the bay area – and the entire nation – to the very core. Since he was shot by a white police officer, this is considered an act of racism. But why is there still a gap in races, even today, in 2016. Discriminating among one race because you are another is not right. It has never been right, and it will never be right. Some people need to get their heads out of their butts and realize that the color of someone’s skin should have no effect on how they are treated. There are white thugs just as commonly as there are black. Even as it unfolds with a terrible sense of inevitability, “Fruitvale Station” is rarely predictable. The climatic encounter with BART police officers erupts in a mood of vertiginous uncertainty, defusing facile or inflammatory judgments and bending the audience’s emotional horror and moral outrage toward a both necessary and difficult ethical inquiry. How did this happen? How did we – meaning any one of us who might see faces of our own depicted on that screen – allow