If you’re familiar at all with the Coen brothers and haven’t seen Fargo, it falls, in tone and style, almost squarely between O Brother Where Art Thou and No Country for Old Men. That is to say, it’s unbelievably hilarious, but unnervingly dark. A dark comedy. A dark comedy of errors.
At its core, Fargo is a movie about very simple people making very simple choices and ending up in ever-more-incredible situations. It’s a comedy of crime and begins when one very poor choice, and spirals out of control from there.
Like No Country for Old Men, Fargo is set against a bleak and enormous landscape. The cold and snow of Minneapolis and North Dakota pervade the entire movie. I love this about the Coen brothers. They work well to turn these huge, wide open spaces, into menacing, lonely places. As the viewer, they give you a sense of how isolated and alone a particular character is just by setting them against a huge white field of snow. It’s brilliant and works well as the different characters’ increasingly poor choices marginalize them both physically and psychologically from the rest of the world.
Fargo is brilliantly acted. Frances McDormand, who captured an Oscar for her role, plays a pregnant police officer tracking her hapless suspects across statelines. We’re first introduced to her character, brilliantly, as she’s awakened in the middle of the night by a phone call. She has to rush to the scene of a triple-homicide, but not before her husband cooks her a meal of eggs, and then jump starts her police cruiser. William H. Macy plays an automobile salesmen who loses complete control of his life about five minutes into the film when his flawed plan to kidnap, and then ransom back his wife in order to cheat money out of his tight-fisted father-in-law goes decidedly wrong. And then there’s Steve Buscemi who pretty much, I think, plays himself (which is awesome).
Really, these characters are incredible. When I say simple people, I mean it. McDormand’s character is alarmingly down-to-earth and without any effort at all, puts each piece of the puzzle together throughout the film. In what seems entirely effortless—second-nature—she pieces clue after clue together to track her suspects. Likewise, Macy plays a character who’s ridiculous choices land him in deeper and deeper trouble. And unlike a standard-fair comedy, where otherwise normal people make seemingly idiotic choices (often times unbelievably so), Macy’s character in and of himself is ridiculous: the choices he makes, then, are perfectly natural. It works so well.
As a disclaimer, the Coen brothers are known for their language and this movie has its fair share of f-bombs, especially once one of the main characters is shot in the face, but if you can appreciate context I wouldn’t worry about it.
I could go on, at even greater length, about this film because it’s one of my favourites. The characters are brilliant (Oscar-winning), the writing is brilliant (Oscar-winning) and the cinematography, the landscapes, the atmosphere—brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. The Coen brothers do very good work and, in my opinion, this is one of their best.
Update: Just proof-read this post and corrected the egregious spelling errors. I apologize for the previously poor quality.
“… and then we’ve got this execution-type deal.”
[...] achieve. Well ahead of the whole indie rock movement. Even their music video, which has a decidedly Fargo feel to it, seems ahead of the curve when you compare it to the other stuff that was being [...]