Fargo

365 Films

Entry #87

Fargo (1996)

Directed by Joel Coen

I will be completely honest in admitting that my primary interest in the 1996 film Fargo came from little more than a fleeting curiosity in the fact that one of the creators had my name.  For those of you poor souls out there you have kept up with this blog in the order it has been presented, you may be puzzled by this entry in seeing as how I’ve already discussed the Coen’s preceding film, The Hudsucker Proxy.  What can I say? Sometimes shit just comes up and you deal with it.  I felt like writing about Hudsucker first so I did, but that was not the film that introduced me to the weird and wild cinematic universe of the Coen brothers.  That film most certainly would be Fargo.  I don’t know if any of you out there experienced this growing up but I always used to get my information about grown-up movies in little bits and pieces.  I don’t think I was specifically forbidden from seeing Fargo but at the time, all I really knew about it was my previously stated shared handle with one of the filmmakers (and the fact that he and his brother made the movie also kind of blew my mind at the time).  This was not an action movie, Wesley Snipes was nowhere near it, and there didn’t appear to be an explosion in sight, therefore, I stayed away.  It was only a matter of time before even someone with a mild interest in film reviews and cultural trends noticed that this film had latched on tight to the public imagination.  You would hear about certain scenes, certain moments, and in the specific case of Fargo you couldn’t escape the particulars of the variety of gruesome death on display.  The only thing I knew about this movie before I eventually saw it on video, for example, was that at some point, somebody wound up a wood chipper.  I remember being underwhelmed by Fargo upon my initial viewing.  I didn’t really get the humor and to be brutally honest again, I vividly remember how horrified I was by the idea that the sequence where Peter Stormare shoots the highway patrolman point blank in the top of the skull would be capped off by two completely random innocent victims meeting their grim fate by committing no less of a sin than randomly being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  I didn’t understand how anybody could find comedy in these bleak proceedings and the whole enterprise just completely rubbed me the wrong way.  I suppose it’s entirely possible that my appreciation of Fargo only came about by way of my immediate and full-on embrace of the follow up, The Big Lebowski.  But that’s another blog entry for another day.  What happened with Fargo was that I think I was blinded by the pop-culture phenomenon of the film and was unable to see the piece for what it was.  That combined with getting older and learning to appreciate the fine art of what is commonly known as “black comedy”, I am now comfortable with calling Fargo as close to a perfect film as one can get.  There’s so much to savor in this movie that I could spend pages and pages trying to get at the all the immaculately nuanced nooks and crannies carefully tucked inside this story, so I’ll try to be as concise as I can.  I think all you need to know about Fargo is proudly announced in the film’s opening shot.  The barren, frozen whiteout alien landscape, Carter Burwell’s funereal march score, and the image of a lifeless mass being dragged through the snow to meet its ultimate destination.  All the while the iconic, frozen, and bemused expression of Paul Bunyan watches as the human folly and fatality pile up.  This is the universe as seen and created by the Coen brothers.  It’s bleak, it’s an anonymous void, and we are helpless to understand it.  This is where, for me, Fargo really earns it stripes because it’s very easy to point out the universality of the theory that we all suck and we all get what’s coming to us (there’s a movie playing right now in theaters that traffics in this kind of cynical bullshit). Yet what the Coens do here and it’s all the more remarkable because it’s an attribute of their films for which they rarely receive credit, they inject a massive dose of heart and soul into the film.  Through all the anarchic madness and mind-boggling violence, there’s Marge Gunderson.  She, the embodiment of Mid-Western politeness who is somehow able to (almost) single handedly bring down a botched kidnapping scheme and ultimately deliver what little justice is left to be served.  In her final ruminations we understand that she is not just some naïve rube content with putting blinders on and shutting out the evils of the would around her.  She doesn’t understand it entirely but she does acknowledge it and the final impressions we are left with are not those of hopeless despair, but in fact, hope itself.  Hope in the idea that there are more Marge Gundersons out there than Jerry Lundegaards.  That is why I will always love Fargo.