Spring 2014 #4: Fargo (1996) - Joel Coen (AND ETHAN)

Sorry Ethan Coen is “uncredited” as a director and I thought, fuck that.

So oddly enough, while Rear Window was my fourth Hitchcock movie, Fargo is my fourth Coen brothers movie, after No Country For Old Men (2007), Miller’s Crossing (1990), and The Big Lebowski (1998). I love the Coen brothers, mostly because I studied genre film for a semester (which is why I saw the gangster film, Miller’s Crossing) and they basically pride themselves on their modern interpretations of classic film genres. Almost all of their films follow a genre to the letter, but always with their own brand of humor and a modern version of the genre’s tropes. No Country For Old Men is no different from any classic Western of the 1920s-50s, and The Big Lebowski (being based on the work of detective novelist Raymond Chandler) can be read as both a parody and an homage to the film noir genre.

So anyway, Fargo follows a man named Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy), a executive sales manager at a car dealership (that his father-in-law owns) who wants to open his own lot and is desperate for money.

He hires the mysterious and unpredictable Carl and Gaear to kidnap his wife and sell her back for $80,000 ransom, which Jerry will get half of (he really tells his father-in-law that the ransom is $1 million and plans to only give the kidnappers their $40,000). Things go very, very wrong.

The best part about the movie is the police chief from the town where the two kidnappers commit an unplanned triple homicide. Her name is Marge Olmstead-Gunderson, and she is seven months pregnant during the investigation. She has a thick midwestern accent.

And she is more capable than any of her coworkers, a great testament to the ability for success for women in any field. She sees right through Jerry, where she is led because the car that the kidnappers are driving is one he stole from his own dealership.

But the film is full of dark humor, because in a place with so many interesting and archetype-breaking characters, there is also murder everywhere.

The film also claims to be based on true events, but the Coen brothers later have only stated that the wood-chipper scene is based on a real murder.

The kidnappers are also hilarious, because you have a Coen brothers’ staple, Steve Buscemi, as a neurotic and bumbling idiot, and his partner Gaear, who could not care less about the lives of those around him. They definitely make a great team.

I can’t exactly tell if the film is a direct reference to the film noir genre, because while there is a sad ending for one protagonist, there is also a lot of ambiguity about who the protagonist actually is throughout the film. We root for Jerry to get the money his rich father-in-law won’t lend him, but we root for Marge because she is a badass pregnant police officer who knows how to get out of a tough situation better than any man in the film. If anything I’d say it does more in the way of a screwball comedy than a film noir, because of the challenging of gender roles and the almost absurd situations the characters get themselves in. Plus the accents  and local sayings are so hilarious.

In fact, Frances McDormand got an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress for her role, while Joel and Ethan got the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. The film is #151 on the IMDb Top 250, and while it didn’t make the cut for the 2007 AFI 100 Movies list, it was #84 in the 1998 version. I personally loved it and I think every movie should be made with midwestern accents from now on.