FARGO
A film review by Andrew Mitchell
Copyright 1997 Andrew Mitchell
I saw Fargo on Saturday night. I had to make a reservation at Roger's video a week ahead to get it. But it was worth it. And despite all the hype I thoroughly enjoyed it and would put it on my top 10 list for the year.
I liked the outlandishness of the situation and the reactions of our Minnesotan neighbours. Didn't Rose from the Golden Girls come from this part of Minnesota? The people in this movie sure seemed to be of the same intellect. I think most of the people in Brainerd were of Swedish descent. The accents were fun. Sounded very Canadian to me. Reminded me a lot of "Blue Velvet" for the fact that a most horrendous crime takes place in a small, happy town where the usual tragedy is missing the weekly all you can eater. Frances McDormand was a revelation. She captured the comic character without making fun of it, thus creating a real person which seemed lacking in her police partner. She reminds me of certain people who have an innate brilliance for what they do but seem entirely vapid elsewhere. Or the kind of person who would face a tragedy and not need therapy because they wouldn't comprehend the severity of the situation. I especially liked the first breakfast scene with the long take of her husband eating breakfast and then her coming back into the house to ask for a jump for the car. Reminded me of that static scene at the end of Big Night where Secondo is whipping up the omellette. I also liked the scene with her and the Asian high school guy she met at the Radisson(where they make real good food). Her reactions were priceless from the fixing of her hair as she walked in to the place to her calm solace after he made the moves on her. She remained reasonably sunny all through and wasn't even phased later when she found out his wife didn't die of leukemia as he purported. There are whackos all around her but she manages to retain a safe distance from it all. Not even a blemish. And after all that's happened, doncha know it, we get a nice happy ending. Her hon gets his artwork published on a stamp!
http://www.inforamp.net/~amitch/andrew.html
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews