Joel Coen (1996)

Fargo is one of Joel and Ethan Coen’s most celebrated films.  (It dates from the period when they split the directing and producing credits between them rather than sharing both, as they now do.)  I took against it strongly when I first saw it, not long after its initial release, but the Coen brothers have made plenty more movies since and I’ve even liked one or two.  I thought it was time to give Fargo another try but to no avail:  it’s still infuriating.  Not for the first or last time, what’s objectionable (and dispiriting) is the supercilious relish with which the Coens demonstrate how nasty and/or ridiculous people are.  Wikipedia describes this story of a kidnap that goes lethally wrong as a ‘black comedy thriller’; it does, for the most part, treat grim events with levity and includes some tense, suspenseful moments.  There are also two departures from the prevailing tone.  These occur at the very start and close to the end of the film.  Both are particularly revealing of the Coens’ approach.

Jerry Lundegaard (William H Macy) is sales manager for an Oldsmobile dealership in Minneapolis.  In dire financial straits, he hires – on the advice of an ex-con mechanic (Steve Reevis) at his workplace – two small-time crooks, Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi) and Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare), to abduct his wife Jean (Kristin Rudrüd).  The idea is that Jerry’s wealthy father-in-law Wade Gustafson (Herve Presnell), the dealership boss, will pay a hefty ransom for his daughter’s release – hefty enough for Jerry to pay the kidnappers their fee and for all his money troubles to be over.  It’s unnecessary to detail how the plan misfires:  the ingenuity of the Coens’ (Oscar-winning) screenplay consists in interweaving the various vices and shortcomings of their characters to ensure that everything that can go wrong, does.  On his first entrance, to the bar in Fargo, North Dakota where he’s arranged to meet Carl and Gaear, William H Macy makes clear that Jerry is an anxious loser and that’s the way he stays throughout, regardless of the increasingly bizarre circumstances in which he’s entangled.   This is more or less true of everyone else too, with the exception of Brainerd, Minnesota police chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand), who appears on the scene around halfway through and becomes an increasingly welcome presence in the film.

It may console the Coens that the bad guys are as inept as they’re malicious.  Their derision for the relatively blameless is harder to understand, and to take.  The hapless kidnap victim is the chief example.  Jean has been presented as a joke even before the sequence in which, as she sits knitting and grinning at daytime TV, masked intruders interrupt her mindless routine.  She puts up more of a fight than might be expected but that allows plenty of time for the camera to observe her kitsch ornaments and pink telephone.  Her resistance ends when, swathed in a shower curtain, she can’t see where she’s going and falls downstairs, knocking herself out.  Comparatively very minor characters are a laughing matter too – a succession of hookers (Larissa Kokernot, Melissa Peterman, Michelle Hutchinson) who talk funny, a cashier (Petra Boden) who’s not a pretty face.   As will be clear from some of the names above, a good few people in Fargo belong to a Scandinavian immigrant community – are their speech rhythms and idiosyncratic dialect comical!   The same goes for Mike Yanagita (Steve Park), a genial Japanese-American eventually revealed to be a pathetic, delusional weirdo.  Marge was in high school with Mike, who gets in touch again after seeing her interviewed on television about the police investigation that follows the discovery of three dead bodies outside Brainerd.  Even the town itself (like Fargo, a real place) is worth a snigger or two – after all, its name sounds a bit like ‘brain dead’.

The Coens’ tactic for making the audience think twice about what they’re seeing is to trash figures of fun or hate to a point that wipes the smile off your face (if it ever got there).  Hostage Jean is eventually finished off by Gaear.  This happens off-screen; her killer reports that she ‘started shrieking, you know’.  The viewer’s natural reaction – oh no, how terrible – needs a bit of unpacking.  It amounts to a feeling that Jean didn’t deserve to be kidnapped and murdered even though she was a laughable ninny.   Essentially similar considerations apply to her loathsome father – who thinks the ransom asked for his daughter is steep and takes a lot of persuading to cough up the money.  Wade Gustafson is an arrogant, mercenary bastard but it’s still a bit much when Carl Showalter shoots him dead.  And Carl himself, for all his faults, doesn’t really deserve to be on the receiving end of a fatal axe blow from Gaear, who then feeds his dismembered body into a woodchipper:  the last seen of Carl is one white-socked foot sticking out of the machine that consumes him.

The objection that this is a wholly subjective reaction to the moral universe of Fargo is answered by my getting to know the Coens better than I did when I first watched the film.  Once you’ve seen a movie like A Serious Man (2009), you know you’re not imagining smug misanthropy on the brothers’ part – that Fargo reflects a modus operandi that’s been repeated over the years.  What’s remarkable is that, when they suddenly change tack in the course of a film, their admirers accept this so readily.  The second of the tone shifts mentioned in the first paragraph of this note happens when Marge, after arresting Gaear, drives him back to Brainerd and has a one-way conversation with her backseat passenger:

‘So that was Mrs Lundegaard in there? … I guess that was your accomplice in the wood chipper. … And those three people in Brainerd. … And for what?  For a little bit of money. …  There’s more to life than money, you know. …  Don’t you know that?…  And here ya are, and it’s a beautiful day…’

Marge’s Scandiwegian verbal mannerisms, so conspicuous at first, have been toned down by the time she gets to deliver this key speech.  Frances McDormand invests the lines with authentic feeling but Joel Coen is using his wife’s gifts to pull a fast one on the audience:  it suits his and his brother’s purpose to turn briefly solemn.   They evidently succeeded in taking in, for example, the critic Kim Newman, who concluded his Sight & Sound (June 1996) review as follows:

‘Here, with chilling but touching directness, Coen cuts his amusing but distanced comic approach and shows a heart that matches his undoubted skill.’

Perhaps viewers like Newman suddenly feel guilty that they’ve been laughing and have to tell themselves it’s OK, the Coens are humane really – though such reactions probably give Joel and Ethan an extra laugh.

Frances McDormand does show a heart that matches her undoubted skill.   The early scenes describing Marge’s home life with her husband Norm (John Carroll Lynch), although distinctive because they’re sweet rather than sour, are  a condescending cartoon.  But McDormand’s radiant decency soon has an elevating effect.  Once Marge, heavily pregnant with her and Norm’s first child, turns out to be not just appealingly eccentric but a canny sleuth too, there’s traction between her good nature and the violent crimes she’s trying both to solve and to fathom.  If only there were more people like Marge in the world – Coenworld, that is.  Fargo is not a long film – 98 minutes – and its heroine must feature in less than half of them.  (In terms of screen time, this must be one of the shortest performances ever to have won the Academy Award for Best Actress.)  It’s all the more of a relief when McDormand’s Marge does takes charge.

Roger Deakins’s cinematography and Carter Burwell’s score also play a part in giving proceedings depth on the surface.  Deakins’s snowy landscapes convey, as well as an unsurprising bleakness, a beauty lacking in the human beings they contain.  Burwell’s music occasionally has the quality of a lament.  But these elements and even Frances McDormand’s contribution aren’t enough to upstage the controlling sensibility of Fargo.  Its first tonal surprise arrives in text on the screen before the action is underway:

‘This is a true story.  The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987.  At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed.  Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.’

Sharp-eyed viewers noted, however, that the closing credits included a standard ‘all characters fictitious’ disclaimer and the seeming contradiction naturally prompted questions.  There’s been continuing discussion of the issue over the years; various elements of the plot and locale have been linked to more than one real-life crime.  Joel Coen’s quoted responses (in the Wikipedia article on the film) include the following:

‘The basic events are the same as in the real case, but the characterizations are fully imagined … If an audience believes that something’s based on a real event, it gives you permission to do things they might otherwise not accept’

and, more recently,

‘[The story was] completely made up.  Or, as we like to say, the only thing true about it is that it’s a story.’

Their admirers probably find these remarks priceless examples of the Coens’ prankish, breathtaking cool – probably don’t mind a bit that they were taken in – cowed into wow-this-actually-happened respect – when they first saw Fargo.  It’s telling that Joel and Ethan Coen’s afterthoughts are – perhaps – more genuine than most of what they put on the screen.

26 April 2019