Fargo (1996)
Directed by Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

Film Review

After a somewhat erratic start to their filmmaking career Joel and Ethan Coen finally hit their stride with this superbly crafted jet black comedy-thriller, a film which boldly claims to have been inspired by a true story but which is in fact a work of pure fiction (albeit one that liberally borrows from several real-life incidents).  Whilst Fargo has many similarities with the Coens' debut film, Blood Simple (1984), it is a far slicker, far more sophisticated work and, for all its austere wintry setting and surfeit of blood-splattered ultra-violence, it has a warmth and sincerity that is generally hard to come by in the Coens' films.  A massive critical and commercial success, Fargo was nominated for seven Oscars in 1997, in categories that included Best Picture and Best Director, and it took two awards, for its leading actress (Frances McDormand) and screenplay.  This is the Coens at their near-best - one of the most compelling and most memorable American thrillers of the 1990s.

Smartly written and directed with breath-taking panache, Fargo grabs the spectator's attention from the first scene and doesn't let go for a nanosecond.  The only sympathetic character in the film is the completely fearless, heavily pregnant Marge Gunderson (superbly played by Frances McDormand, a regular of the Coens' films and Joel Coen's wife), who makes the unlikeliest (and cutest) crime investigator since Peter Falk's Columbo.  Every other character (mostly male) is as vile and pathetic a species of humanity as you can imagine, and yet the Coens somehow manage to render each of them human, through some subtle, but highly effective dark comedy.  William H. Macy's Jerry Lundegaard, the crooked car dealer who has his wife kidnapped, deserves our contempt, but we can hardly help sympathising with him as his badly conceived plan goes up the swanny.  The same goes for the trigger-happy kidnapper Carl Showalter (convincingly portrayed by Steve Buscemi) - he is as bad as they come, but even he doesn't deserve to end up in the wood chipper.

The snow-covered highway wilderness in which most of the film takes place, beautifully photographed by Roger Deakins, brings an almost surreal, fairytale-like quality to the film, something that renders the few brief moments of extreme violence particularly shocking.  Just as the setting feels strangely unreal, so the characters have an unsettlingly comicbook feel about them.  Only Marge Gunderson convinces us that she is a real person living in the real world (apparently content with her badly paid job and no-hoper husband); everyone else seems to exist in a kind of delusional fantasy, having no sense of what is right or wrong and therefore pursuing an existence that is as pointless as it is selfish.  We share Marge's incomprehension about the state of the world around her at the end of the film: just why can't people be grateful for what they have, instead of mucking up their lives for a few measly bits of paper?   Despite its warped humour and the shining humanity of its central heroine, Fargo takes us into a very dark place before driving home its underlying moral - that there is far more to life than money - with devastating effect.

Film Synopsis

Minneapolis car dealer Jerry Lundegaard needs money, badly.  In a desperate attempt to save his ailing business he tries to persuade his wealthy father-in-law Wade Gustafson to lend him a large sum of money to secure a real estate deal, but Gustafson is too smart for his son-in-law and refuses to stump up the money.  Jerry has one last hope, to arrange that his wife be kidnapped so that he can collect a share of the ransom money.  Through one of his employees, he makes contact with two hardened criminals, Carl Showalter and Gaear Grimsrud, and they agree to take part in Jerry's insane scheme.  The abduction goes off as planned, but things soon get out of hand.  In their getaway, the kidnappers shoot dead a patrol cop and two passers-by, and the local police chief Marge Gunderson is soon on their tail.  Despite being seven months' pregnant, Marge is determined to bring the killers to book and it isn't long before Jerry Lundegaard has her breathing down his neck.  When Wade Gustafson hears about the abduction, he insists on delivering the ransom money himself, and is prepared to use his gun if his daughter is not returned to him unharmed.  Expecting Jerry to deliver the money, Showalter is taken by surprise and shoots Gustafson dead, but only after sustaining a bullet wound himself.  Marge finally succeeds in tracing the kidnappers' getaway car and arrives at their hideout, just in time to see Grimsrud feeding his accomplice into the wood chipper...