REVIEWER'S NOTE: For those of you who are paying attention, yes, I had already written a review of FARGO some time ago. I recently saw the film again, and while this isn't the first time I have changed my mind about a film after another viewing, this is the first time that I felt like I had cheated a four-star masterpiece out of its rating. See below for explanation.
Film review by Kevin Patterson
FARGO Rating: **** (out of four) R, 1996 Directed by Joel Coen. Written by Joel and Ethan Coen. Starring Frances McDormand, William Macy, Steve Buscemi, Peter Stormare.
As the Coen Brothers' FARGO begins, shifty Minneapolis car salesman Jerry Lundegaard (William Macy) drives down a snow-bound road to a bar in Fargo, North Dakota, where he meets two thugs-for-hire, Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi) and Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare). He has a rather unique proposition for them; they are to kidnap his wife and demand $80,000 in ransom from her wealthy father, then split the ransom money with Jerry. What is instantly clear, however, is that, as well as being generally unsavory types, Showalter and Grimsrud are dumber than a box of rocks and probably should not be trusted with Jerry's laundry, much less his wife. Between that and the fact that FARGO is the latest from Joel and Ethan Coen, who brought us BLOOD SIMPLE and RAISING ARIZONA, among others, it's a pretty safe bet from then on that things are going to go haywire. Pretty soon, the very pregnant Sheriff Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) of Brainerd, Minnesota is being called in to investigate a triple homicide on an isolated highway and Jerry's scatter-brained scheme is going hopelessly awry.
FARGO is far from the typical crime/suspense thriller. It is "about" this kidnapping scheme, but it is about a lot of other things too. It is about Northern accents and expressions like "you betcha." It is about ice on the windshield and large quantities of snow. Most importantly, it is about how a laid-back community of Northern Midwesterners come face-to-face with cold-blooded evil in the persons of Showalter and Grimsrud, and how they deal with it in their typically laid-back, golly-gee-whiz (or in this case, "oh yah, yer darn-tootin'!"), easy-going way. McDormand herself has described it as "miles and miles of pure white snow, splattered with red blood."
Stylistically, FARGO occupies a middle ground between BLOOD SIMPLE and RAISING ARIZONA: it has both the disturbing violence of the former and the wacky humor of the latter. Sometimes it even has both at once, such as when Jerry finds a piece of Showalter's handywork in the form of a dead parking lot clerk and mutters, "Oh jeez" with all the animation of someone who just stubbed his toe. The kidnapping scene itself is a similar mix; Mrs. Lundegard and Showalter stare curiously at each other through the window for a good thirty seconds before the two thugs break in, and later, when she bites Grimsrud's hand in attempt to escape, he goes upstairs to clean himself up in the family's bathroom, leaving Showalter to chase her. The Coens do not make the mistake of laughing off the violence entirely, however; the scene in which Grimsrud hunts down two witnesses and kills them execution-style, for example, is unabatedly vicious and brutal.
FARGO is sometimes black-comic and sometimes just plain black, but there is plenty of good-natured humor as well, most of it deriving from the quirks of the local culture and the charm of McDormand's character. "Oh, for Pete's sake, he's fleein' the interview!" she exclaims at one point when a suspect eludes her during an interrogation. Not only is she instantly likeable and intelligent, she is also remarkably hardy and persistent for a woman seven months pregnant. When she arrives at the initial crime scene, for example, beset with morning sickness, she excuses herself momentarily to vomit, then returns and promptly gets back to her job. The locals, meanwhile, are featured in several scenes in which witnesses call the police with long-winded, banal stories but can only describe Showalter as "a little fella, kinda funny-lookin'." The interaction between Showalter and Grimsrud is also quite amusing at times, such as when Showalter, frustrated by Grimsrud's lack of interest in coversation, delivers a thoroughly un-silent monologue about how "two can play at that game, buddy," and how he is going to be completely [bleeping] silent.
What the Coens have created in FARGO is not only an interesting, off-beat slice of culture but also an examination of the moral conflicts underlying the characters' behavior. It's almost like the flip-side to David Lynch's BLUE VELVET: in both films, innocent, clean-cut protagonists from a seemingly peaceful small town stumbles into a shockingly violent crime scenario that reveals ugly secrets hidden underneath their heretofore laid-back existence. But while Lynch's protagonist found himself unable to deal with the evil and perversity that he discovered without first dealing with his own "dark side," Marge Gunderson emerges untainted. She investigates the crimes with notable intelligence and stands her moral ground, as she confronts the criminals' selfishness head-on, allowing herself to feel disgust and even bewilderment, but never letting it shake her long-held perceptions of herself and of what's right and wrong.
The Coens have, throughout their filmmaking career, returned periodically to the theme of an Ordinary Joe who perseveres even when confronted by nutcases and two-timing jerks. FARGO isn't quite their best film (that honor still goes to BARTON FINK, their 1991 surreal psychodrama that sent up artistic pretension and Hollywood commercialism) but at the very least, Marge Gunderson turns out to be an Ordinary Josephine who almost certainly outclasses all the Coens' previous Ordinary Joes (which is not an easy act to follow). Poignant, intelligent, and occasionally hilarious, FARGO is a fine example of filmmaking that no one should miss.
- - Why I re-wrote this review - -
For one thing, I don't think I fully grasped the moral conflicts that I discussed in the second-to-last paragraph above when I first reviewed the film: at the time, I saw FARGO as mostly just an off-beat examination of the local culture within the framework of a crime thriller. Also, I criticized the film on two grounds which, in retrospect, were mostly irrelevant. The dangling plot thread of which I spoke was incidental at best, and returning to it at the end would almost certainly have disrupted the narrative flow. As for the criminals taking too long to get things moving, there does seem to be a slight amount of sloppiness - they seem to take half the day driving from the Twin Cities to Brainerd, when in reality it's only a few hours - but again, this is at most a minor flaw and not a serious detraction from the film's overall effectiveness.
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