Joel and Ethan Coen are a sibling filmmaking team that have been
making great, offbeat films since their first, Blood Simple--released in 1984--and
continuing with Miller’s Crossing, Raising Arizona, and The Big Lebowski, among
others; building up an impressive body of work that has made them renown for
their very distinctive style that sets their films apart from the usual sap that
Hollywood excretes. But if they ever made a true masterpiece, then it has to be
Fargo, their 1996 crime story that’s reportedly based on a true incident that occurred
during the Winter of 1987 in Minnesota.
One night in Fargo, North Dakota, a car salesman named Jerry Lundergard goes to
a bar to meet with two men named Carl Showalter and Gaear Grimsrud. He sits and
haggles with the men over the plan: he’s to give Carl and Gaear a brand new
car--which he towed to the bar behind his own vehicle--as well as forty thousand
dollars. In exchange, Carl and Gaear are to kidnap Jean, Jerry’s wife, and when
they ask for the ransom, it’ll be for eighty thousand dollars, which they’ll
split up with Jerry. But Carl, played by the great Steve Buscemi, has some
reservations about the whole deal. If Jerry needs money, why is he having his
own wife kidnapped? Jerry, played in an off-kilter, oddball fashion by the
superb William H. Macy, explains that his wife is from a wealthy family, and
that this hackneyed plot that he dreamed up is the only way that he can get his
hands on some money.
However, no sooner is the plan set in motion then things start to go awry for
Jerry. For one thing, giving the boys a new car as co-payment is something that
doesn’t go unnoticed at Jerry’s job. And after Jerry’s wife is abducted, another
problem arises when Carl and Gaear are pulled over by a cop on a lonely stretch
of road. It’s only because they don’t have the proper tags, but it’s a pretty
tense scene with Jean trussed up in the back seat--at least until Gaear kills
the cop, plus two other people in another car who had the misfortune to be
driving by at the time. These murders arouse the suspicions of a most unusual
and crafty cop: Marge Gunderson, the happily married--and very pregnant--chief
of police of Brainerd.
Marvelously played by Frances McDormand, who won a
well-deserved Oscar for this role, Marge turns out to be a very shrewd and
dogged cop underneath her cheerful, easy-going personality. Her performance,
along with that of the rest of the cast, is what drives this film, along with
its deft balance of horror and comedy (Peter Stormare’s career-making role as
Gaear demonstrates ably this: he’s a cold-blooded monster who doesn’t think
twice about killing people--and yet in one of the film’s funniest scenes, he
gets hooked in the sudsy goings-on of a TV soap opera). The DVD special features
include a commentary by Rodger A. Deakins, the director of photography, a
Charlie Rose interview with Frances McDormand and the Coen Brothers and a new
"making of" documentary, "Minnesota Nice". While Fargo may be the best of the
Coen Brothers films, does it qualify as being one of the best movies of all
time? Yer darn tootin’! --SF
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