Rated R for violence, murder, gore, sex, nudity, and language. It's funny, because the movie's tone almost is spitting in the face of the graphic content that you watch. I want to say that the movie isn't that bad, but it actually is kind of a brutal watch if I was just making a tally of all of the questionable content in the film. R.
DIRECTORS: Joel and Ethan Coen I don't think I was cinematically saavy enough to appreciate Fargo the first time I watched it. A lot of that came down to expectation. I knew about two things going into Fargo the first time that I watched it: people's regional dialects were funny and that there was a woodchipper somewhere in the movie. Well, there definitely was a woodchipper; I didn't get that wrong. But if you are watching this movie because people's regional dialects are funny, you'd be both right and wrong at the same time. I'd like to think that I'm more well-rounded. I do know that I've come back to this movie in a better headspace. I've seen almost all of the Coen Brothers' movies (I have a vague memory of having seen The Ladykillers at some point in time.) I have also watched every season of Noah Hawley's FX show Fargo, which has given me a greater appreciation for what Fargo is supposed to be. In 1996, I was 13. I maybe saw it when I was 15 or 16. The movie was never really made for me then. Now, I guess the cinematic savant came at this movie --as snobby as that is --and I loved it. See, there's this very specific headspace that you have to go into Fargo with. It simultaneously is like every other murder thriller that you've seen and completely it's own movie. I honestly would have a hard time putting Fargo on a double bill outside of another Coen Brothers movie. It's just that the Coen Brothers have their own cinematic language dedicated to worshipping and deifing the common. Without being political (in the sense of actively political), they take red states and make them almost the world of fantasy. Everything about Fargo is an attempt to make the real world look like a set. There's a shot of Frances Macdormand sitting in her cruiser eating Hardees --a motif throughout the film is her family's obsession with contextualizing the macabre with scheduled eating --and there's a billboard in the background for Miller Genuine Draft. The billboard makes a joke about how cold their beer is and that the town is cold enough already. While I can't say I remember this particular ad campaign, something about it screams "verisimilitude" with a heightened sense of importance. I think that O Brother, Where Art Thou; Big Lebowski, or No Country for Old Men might be the quintessential Coen Brothers movie, but I can see why Fargo is often lumped into those top tier examples. It may be overshadowed by time, simply because there have been so many exceptional films by these two. But Fargo works not just because it tells a brutal and compelling tale contrasted by a small setting, but because it honestly puts characterization first. I won't lie; a kidnapping plot gone horrifically wrong is probably incredible watchable in itself. I don't want to downplay the importance of plot in the film. But the Coens do this thing where every character, with the intentional juxtaposition of Grimsrud, is so fully developed that it becomes almost a commentary on midwestern life. Margie is supposed to be the avatar for the audience. The cop who is on the outside of the tale often is meant to be tabula rasa. I'm thinking of the Sam Spades out there. Sure, Spade may be a bit of a jerk and an alcoholic, but he doesn't have a personal life to share on screen. Margie, however, has a completely arbitrary backstory that doesn't tie into the plot. I'm saying this as a positive, by the way. Margie has multiple subplots that give us only a hint of what it means to live outside of Fargo (or, if being specific, Brainerd / the Twin Cities). While the case of the triple homicide is her plot, she's living this complex life. She seems happily married to a man who paints mallards for competeitions. They are obsessed with mealtime, taking pleasure at any opportunity to have something. Their love language surrounds surprising each other with small meals or gifts. In the case of Margie, she stops by the bait-and-tackle place immediately after identifying a horror show to pick up nightcrawlers for her husband, who is later revealed to go ice fishing. Simultaneously, she almost flirts with the notion of an emotional affair. She meets with Mike Yanagita, much to the surprise of her husband (who doesn't know she's going to meet Mike, but finds it odd that she volunteers to go to the Twin Cities unprovoked). I stress that it is a contemplated emotional affair because she sets clear boundaries with Mike, who seems to be fishing for a sexual conquest / relationship with a clearly pregnant Margie. The entire Mike bit might have been a step too far in terms of distraction, but it really works. I don't know how. Maybe it's just the commitment to the world of Fargo, but Mike's revelation, that he made up a dead spouse, just seems to remind us that as insane as Jerry's story is going, there's something so small-d-dramatic about the midwest that is grounding. As I stated, I misread this movie the first time I saw it. I don't know why, but I had my priorities all screwed up when I did that viewing. I had a complete misread on Jerry's character. The first time I watched this movie, I was so sympathetic to Jerry. Jerry was this hapless loser (and that part is accurate) that I wanted to win at the end. I don't know why. To me, this was one of those movies where so much crap piled on one dude and the movie was going to end with him getting his moment. He was Milton from Office Space for me. I wanted to see him have his time in the sun. But Jerry's story, which oddly enough is the plot of the movie, despite the fact that Margie has so much emotional baggage, is one of evil. Jerry is evil. Maybe it was because I identified too much with Jerry that I let him off the hook too easily. From a quick watch of the movie, Jerry comes across as a guy who got in over his head. But Jerry isn't that. Listen, I'm wired for empathy, but a second viewing made me see that Jerry is a guy who constantly creates his own problems. We don't actually get a very clear understanding of Jerry's racket. While it seems like Jerry's problem in the beginning has to do with VINs, that is actually a way bigger crime than what we tend to believe. His comfort with crime is similar to someone paying off credit card debt by getting another credit card. There's this house of cards thing that Jerry creates in the film that is kind of fascinating. And the thing is, a lot of it stems off of Jerry's greed. He just pushes his luck a little too far each time. I don't want to make the obvious comparison to Gil from The Simpsons, considering that Gil is just Jack Lemmon from Glengarry Glen Ross, but Jerry isn't the type of personality that should push his luck. (I make the Gil comparison hesistantly because they're both car salesmen.) But let's talk about the moment where Jerry goes into full on punchable mode. The walls are closing in on Jerry. Basically everything that can go wrong has gone wrong. The plan was to extort his father-in-law for $80,000 with the two kidnappers and they'd split the cash. But then Jerry asks for $1,000,000, which is a game-changer in terms of story. It's that million dollars that makes everyone more cautious. Now, I get that Jerry needs more than 40,000 to take care of his woes with the VIN scam he's running. But it is that greed that gets everyone killed. It goes from being a sacrifice to a lifestyle change for Gunderson, leading to the eventual slaughter of all the victims of the film. Okay, so the three people in the initial kidnapping would have been killed regardless. But I'm talking about this epiphany that Jerry has. Jerry follows Gunderson to the drop. After all, he's about to lose all his money to Carl because he got greedy. But it is in that moment where Jerry has to process not only the conceptual deaths that were the three initial homicide victims, but the real world death of Gunderson and the innocence of the garage teller. Yet, Jerry can't think to step outside of his own little world. I applaud the use of "Geez" in this movie because it really does stress how far from the mark these characters get from the real world horror of what Carl and Grimsrud do in the film. He flees, knowing that there's a good chance that Jean will be killed and that Scotty won't have a parent. This guy isn't the hapless loser that I read him as. He's a monster in his own right. I also want to look how the Coens stress the notion of the ambivalence of violence with the kidnappers. Carl and Grimsrud are both lunatics, but on complete opposite sides of the scale. Carl is this guy who flexes and shows off his machismo. I do love that he's the guy that Shep Proudfoot doesn't know because he comes across as the "brains of the operation", in the same way that Nick Bottom is the leader of the Rude Mechanicals, an assumption that is made exclusively by self-perception. He's the guy who causes all of the complications. He's the guy who couldn't manage to change the stickers on the plates, leading to the three murders. He's the guy who whines at the bar, complaining that he can't handle another minute at the house by the lake, despite stressing that he's a murderer. Everything that honestly goes wrong on the kidnapping end happens because of Carl. But that doesn't mean that Grimsrud is devoid of character analysis. Remember, violence is this thing that is simply glossed over from these characters' perspectives. One of my favorite moments (in the most morbid sense of the words) is Jean's death. You know that Jean isn't going to be returned. This movie screams "botched kidnapping" from word one. But there are a handful of moments when Jean looks like she's going to die, but doesn't. You could think that she dies when she falls down the stairs. You think she's going to die from running off blindfolded and tied up into the woods. Heck, maybe something bad happens with the oven. But Jean really holds in there until she just dies off camera? I mean, that is a choice. And it is such a great choice to close of Grimsrud's characterization. Death is such an arbitrary idea to him. He is simply annoyed by her. They kept her alive all that time and it didn't even matter. I mean, sure, the actual money exchange went belly up, but Grimsrud didn't know that. It's also this great moment that almost foreshadows Carl's death. Things that annoy Grimsrud end up dead. He's the pro of the two, but he's also the guy who lifts his mask up during the kidnapping because he doesn't want to put up with Jean's --and by proxy, Jerry's --nonsense. It's great. Honestly, Fargo is an amazing movie. It's the second viewing that really knocked it into place for me. I know that the Coen Brothers are geniuses, but Fargo is one of those movies that still holds up. Yes, it's a classic, but somehow I want it to be more of a classic. |
Film is great. It can challenge us. It can entertain us. It can puzzle us. It can awaken us.
AuthorMr. H has watched an upsetting amount of movies. They bring him a level of joy that few things have achieved. Archives
February 2025
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