Fargo (1996)

Fargo begins with an absolutely dead-on familiarity with small-town life in the frigid winter landscape of Minnesota and North Dakota. Then the Ethan and Joel Coen do to Minneapolis and Brainard, Minnesota what David Lynch does to Lumberton, North Carolina in Blue Velvet. As the film rotates its story through satire, comedy, suspense, and violence you realize the filmmakers have taken enormous risks, gotten away with them, and made a movie that is both original, and familiar. The film is "based on a true story" that took place in Minnesota in 1987 (an entirely false claim used to give the satitical portrait of Middle America a sense of authenticity). It was filmed on location Coen brothers, who grew up in St. Louis Park, a suburb of Minneapolis, and went on to make good movies like Blood Simple (1984) and Miller's Crossing (1990).

A car salesman named Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) desperately needs money for a business deal—a parking lot scheme that can save him from bankruptcy. He is under the thumb of his rich father-in-law (Harve Presnell), who owns the car agency, and treats him like a loser. Jerry hires a couple of scrawny low-lifes named Showalter and Grimsrud (Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare) to kidnap his wife (Kristin Rudrud), and promises to split an $80,000 ransom with them. Simple enough, except that everything goes wrong in completely unanticipated ways, as the plot twists and turns and makes a mockery of all of Jerry's best thinking.

Showalter is nervous, sweaty, talkative, mousy. Grimsrud is a sullen slug of few words. During the course of the kidnapping, he unexpectedly kills some people ("Oh, Daddy!" says Showalter, terrified). The bodies are found the next morning, frozen beside the highway, in the barren lands between Minneapolis and Brainerd, MN, which is, as we are reminded every time we see the hulking statue outside town, the home of Paul Bunyan. Brainerd's police chief is a pregnant woman named Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand). She talks like one of the McKenzie Brothers, regional accent that's strong on cheerful folksiness. Everybody in the movie talks like that, with lines like "You're dern tootin'." When she gets to the big city, she starts looking for a place with a good buffet. Marge Gunderson needs a jump to get her patrol car started in the morning. But she is a gifted cop, and soon after visiting the murder site, she reconstructs the crime—correctly.

Eyewitnesses place two suspects in a tan Ciera. She traces it back to Jerry Lundegaard's lot. "I'm a police officer from up Brainerd," she tells him, "investigating some malfeasance." Jerry, brilliantly played by Macy, is a man weighed down by the insoluble complexities of the situation he has fumbled himself into. He is so incompetent at crime that, when the kidnapping becomes unnecessary, he can't call off the kidnappers, because he doesn't know their phone number. He's being pestered with persistent calls from GMAC, inquiring about the illegible serial number on the paperwork for the same missing brown Ciera. He tries sending faxes in which the number is smudged. GMAC isn't fooled. Macy creates the unbearable agony of a man who needs to think fast, and whose brain is scrambled with fear, guilt, and the crazy illusion that he can somehow still pull this thing off.

FARGO is filled with dozens of familiar small moments. When the two low-rent hoods stop for the night at a truck stop, for example, they hire hookers. Cut to a shot of bored mercenary sex. Cut to the next shot: They're all sitting up in bed, watching "The Tonight Show" on TV. William H. Macy, who has played salesmen and con men before (he's a veteran of David Mamet's plays), finds just the right note in his scenes in the auto showroom. It's fascinating to watch him in action, trying to worm out of a lie involving an extra charge for rust-proofing. Small roles seem bigger because they're so well written and observed. Kristen Rudrud has few scenes as Jerry's wife, but creates a character out of them, always chopping or stirring something furiously in the kitchen.

Their teenage son, who excuses himself from the table to go to McDonald's, helps establish the milieu of the film with a bedroom that has a poster on its wall for the Accordion Kings. Marge, discussing a hypothetical killer who has littered the highway with bodies, observes matter-of-factly, "I doubt he's from Brainerd." Harve Presnell is a typical self-made millionaire in his insistence on delivering the ransom money himself: He earned it, and by God if anyone is going to hand it over, it'll be him. He wants his money's worth. And on the way to the violent and unexpected climax, Marge has a drink in her hotel buffet with an old high school chum who obviously still lusts after her, even though she's married and pregnant. He explains, in a statement filled with the wistfulness of the downsizable, "I'm working for Honeywell. If you're an engineer, you could do a lot worse."

Frances McDormand won the Academy Award for Best Actress. with a performance, which is true in every individual moment, and yet slyly, quietly, over the top in its cumulative effect.

CAST:

PERFORMER, CHARACTER

Frances McDormand, Marge Gunderson

William H. Macy, Jerry Lundegaard

Steve Buscemi, Carl Showalter

Peter Stormare, Gaear Grimsrud

Harve Presnell, Jerry's Father-In-Law

Kristin Rudrud, Jean Lundegaard

John Carroll Lynch, Norm Gunderson

PRODUCTION:

Producers, Tim Bevan (executive) John Cameron (II) (line) Ethan Coen and Eric Fellner (executive)

Director, Joel Coen

Editors, Ethan Coen (as Roderick Jaynes) Joel Coen (as Roderick Jaynes)

Original Music, Carter Burwell

Cinematography, Roger Deakins

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