Fruitvale Station. Director: Ryan Coogler. Starring: Michael B. Jordan, Octavia Spencer, Melonie Diaz, Ariana Neal. 85 minutes
A world famous drag queen is reunited with his conservative mother after decades of estrangement in the documentary I Am Divine. A Korean orphan dreams of his biological mother and ruminates on his strained relationship with his (Belgian) adoptive mother in the animated memoir Approved for Adoption. A woman goes to great lengths to protect her adult son, after he accidentally kills a child with his car in the drama Child's Pose.
Sometimes at film festivals, connections emerge between what at first appear to be utterly dissimilar films. All of the films I have seen so far at this year's Melbourne International Film Festival have been concerned, substantially if not centrally, with the relationship between mothers and their sons. All reveal the bond to be both singularly resilient and highly susceptible to fate and human foibles.
This is evoked most powerfully in Fruitvale Station. The film is a dramatised account of the last day in the life of 22-year-old Oscar Grant, who was shot dead by police in the early hours of New Years Day, 2009, in Oakland, California. The death of this young, unarmed African-American man sparked protests and riots, and renewed tensions around race and fraught debates about police training and procedure.
Fruitvale Station though is largely divorced from this politicised context. First-time director Coogler has said he wanted to give an account of these events that got beyond headlines to humanity. 'When you know somebody as a human being, you know that life means something,' Coogler told the New York Times. His film builds a portrait of Grant's decidedly flawed humanity via snapshots of the intimate relationships that populate his life.
Grant's death was captured by camera phone; a fact that all but assured his status as a martyr for the cause against racial violence. Coogler's film opens with this footage before flashing back to the previous morning. Mobile phone technology is a central motif throughout the film; phone calls, and text messages which flash up on the screen, provide forensic signposts to the events of Grant's day.
This underpins the film's documentary style, but the focus on communication is also a focus on relationships. Grant calls his mother Wanda (Spencer) for her birthday, and she chides him for talking on his phone while driving; he is both a caring son, and cared for. He sends a text