Fargo

It's hard to pin down: is Fargo a drama or a black comedy? You and I may chuckle at body parts being fed into a wood chipper, but your average moral compass finds this kind of thing quite appalling; scary even. What's clear is that Fargo operates at the intersection of violence and humour in a way that Quentin Tarantino never dreamed of. No zombies, no gun-toting caricatures; this story is told with losers and homely heroines.

The loser in question, car dealer Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy), has serious money problems. He believes his rich (and resentful) father-in-law can help but fails to squeeze him for cash through conventional means. In an act of blind cowardice, he arranges to have his wife kidnapped by two low-lifes, Carl (Steve Buscemi) and Gaear (Peter Stormare). The ransom from Daddy, he thinks, can be split between the kidnappers and himself. No one gets hurt. At least, that's the plan.

But Jerry's best laid plans spill blood when, soon after the kidnapping, the thugs are stopped on the road by a state trooper. Not only do they kill him to avoid the long arm of the law, but two more innocents are executed after driving by the scene. Jerry's response? "Oh, jeez."

Oh, jeez indeed.

And here Fargo begins to tread unfamiliar ground. "Desperate times call for desperate measures," the Paramount execs would think, "enter Agent Sven Strangler, detective from the future!" But that doesn't happen. "How about Vita Vixen, lesbian bodybuilder and crime-fighter by night?" No dice. Instead, this country-noir film gets Police Chief Marge Gundersen (Frances McDormand), the antithesis of Humphrey Bogart's cigar-toking tough guys. Heavily pregnant and uncommonly normal, Marge carefully plods her way from the triple homicide in Brainerd, Minnesota to Minneapolis, where she hopes to find the killers.

In the opening titles, Fargo claims to be a "true", unaltered story about a tragic event. It isn't. But Joel and Ethan Coen's fantasy contribution to Minnesotan history is more "real" than some of the fanciful biopics the Oscar crowd is so fond of. But perhaps a little too real. Reports surfaced in 2001 that a Japanese woman had died* looking for a briefcase full of ransom money in the snow – which is buried by one of Jerry's accomplices in the movie but never recovered. The little white lie about being based on true events irked some movie buffs, but perhaps Fargo needed to be true somehow. After all, it's the everyman's thriller, starring someone we might have known in real life.

Fargo succeeds most obviously as a character study. As inept and pitiful as Jerry Lundegaard manages to be, Marge is capable and collected. At the scene of the murder, she briefly stoops to throw up, not from revulsion, but from morning sickness. While meeting up with a former schoolmate in Minneapolis, she comforts him when he breaks down from grief over his wife's death only minutes after he had hit on her quite distastefully. Her doting husband Norm needs constant reassurance that his paintings will succeed, which she provides despite having three deaths to investigate.

Steve Buscemi deserves special mention for his cult performance as motor-mouth wiseguy Carl Showalter. Carl is the lone, urban cynic in a world of small-town simpletons (as he sees it) and his borderline-psychotic partner in crime, Gaear. In Carl, Fargo comes closest to openly indulging in humour, as memorably occurs when he's driving to Jerry's home with Gaear: "Oh, fuck it, I don't have to talk, either, man! See how you like it. Just total fuckin' silence. Two can play at that game, smart guy. We'll just see how you like it. Total silence." Needless to say, Carl finds it quite hard not to say anything.

In retrospect, it's easy to forget that Fargo is a pretty violent movie. A point-blank gunshot scene, body disposal by wood chipper and a small helping of axe murder all made it to the final cut. But in the face of all this violence, Jerry's prude fits of anger and Marge's wide-eyed cheerfulness keep our attention firmly fixated on the quirks of the human condition. Very few movies have managed this feat without disgracing themselves, and therein lays Fargo's claim to cult classic status.

*The death of the Japanese woman was later ruled as a suicide.

- Niel Bekker

Read the screenplay here.

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