I’m not sure I agree with you one hundred percent on your police work there, Lou ✵ Fargo - SMALL WORLD ✵ 1992–PRESENT - The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

The Movie Book (Big Ideas Simply Explained) (2016)

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IN CONTEXT

GENRE

Crime drama, comedy

DIRECTORS

Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

WRITERS

Joel Coen, Ethan Coen

STARS

William H. Macy, Frances McDormand, Steve Buscemi, Peter Stormare

BEFORE

1984 The Coens’ first feature, Blood Simple, is a film noir in which ordinary folk are led to destruction by their own greed.

AFTER

2013 Another winter’s tale, the Coens’ Inside Llewyn Davis is the tale of a down-on-his-luck songwriter in New York.

2014 In David Zellner’s Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, a Japanese woman goes in search of treasure in Minnesota after watching Fargo, believing it to be real.

Fargo is a tragic farce that plays out at the slow, steady pace of a glacier. It begins with a car salesman named Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy), who desperately needs money to save himself from bankruptcy. Jerry hires grizzled goons Showalter (Steve Buscemi) and Grimsrud (Peter Stormare) to kidnap his wife (Kristin Rudrüd) and promises to split the ransom with the pair once the job is done. It’s a simple plan, but, as with most things in Jerry’s life, it goes horribly wrong.

Jerry’s crime plays out against the blinding white wilderness of winter in Minnesota and North Dakota, in the small towns of Fargo and Brainerd, and on the bleak highway that connects them. During the course of the kidnapping, Grimsrud accidentally kills a carful of people, and he and Showalter soon find that it is hard to dispose of corpses in weather so cold that graves cannot be dug and flesh does not rot. Grimrud hits on a novel solution to this problem in the movie’s audacious final act, but not before Brainerd’s police find his victims by the side of the road. The chief of police is Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand), perhaps the only heavily pregnant detective in the history of cinema.

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Grimsrud (Peter Stormare) and Showalter (Steve Buscemi) are a pair of hapless fools. Everything they do sinks them deeper into trouble.

Uncommon detective

Like everyone else in Brainerd and Fargo, Marge has a folksy Scandinavian-American accent that suggests she’s a bit of a bumpkin. But Marge is clearly on the ball. Carefully, she traces the trail of disasters back to Jerry, who’s not coping well with the pressure. Macy’s study in stress (visible in the close-up far left) is funny and upsetting, and he turns the folksy regional accent into a rhythm of despair.

As filmmakers, the Coen brothers are masters of balancing laughs and chills, and thanks to its crime-thriller trappings and wintry landscape, Fargo is one of their chilliest works. The tone is set in the opening shot, when the camera peers at a car—Jerry’s—threading its way through the blizzard. A doom-laden musical score starts up, and this doesn’t feel like a comedy: from the outset there are hints of horror.

Marge is the heart of the story. Her pregnancy is a symbol of hope in the white wasteland of double-crossing and butchery. Although she is never in any real danger, there is a lingering dread that she will be overcome by the movie’s violence. But the Coen brothers manage to maintain their masterful balancing act amid the carnage, the nihilism of the case forced to co-star with Marge’s deeply rooted decency.

“There’s more to life than a little money, you know. Don’tcha know that?… I just don’t understand it.”

Marge Gunderson / Fargo

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Marge (Frances McDormand) inspects the body of a state trooper. Her provincial manner belies a sharp intelligence.

JOEL AND ETHAN COEN Directors

Joel and Ethan Coen have made more than 20 acclaimed movies. After their first, the sleek thriller Blood Simple, they surprised admirers with Raising Arizona, a romantic black comedy, and have confounded expectations ever since, fusing darkness with laughs. The Coens often use other movies and genres as a starting point, before sprawling off in a direction of their own and crafting an off-kilter, funny-scary atmosphere that is entirely their own.

Key movies

1984 Blood Simple

1991 Barton Fink

1996 Fargo

2007 No Country for Old Men

What else to watch: Blood Simple (1984) ✵ Miller’s Crossing (1990) ✵ The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) ✵ The Big Lebowksi (1998) ✵ The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001) ✵ True Grit (2010)