Fargo Introduction Introduction
Release Year: 1996
Genre: Crime, Drama, Thriller
Director: Joel and Ethan Coen
Writer: Joel and Ethan Coen
Stars: Steve Buscemi, Frances McDormand, William H. Macy
With all that snow, Fargo must be an all-time holiday classic, right?
Um. No.
But Fargo is a classic, known for its innovative, wood-chipper-related corpse-disposal techniques and its soothing Minnesotan accents.
With this story of a small-city police chief investigating a gruesome triple homicide, the Coen Brothers (writing-directing real-life bros Joel and Ethan) demonstrated, yet again, that they were an artistic force to be reckoned with, possessing their own out-there aesthetic and distinctive tone. In Fargo, the everyday goings on of small-town Minnesota collides with scenes of bodies piling up and kidnapping schemes gone catastrophically wrong—classic Coen.
In the wake of this movie's release back in 1996, everyone was busting out their impressions of Minnesota accents (kind of like when Borat came out, but less annoying and offensive). The movie quickly scooped up accolades: the Coens won Best Director at Cannes, and Frances McDormand took home Best Actress at the Oscars for her portrayal of pregnant police chief Marge Gunderson, tromping around in her winter parka, pursuing the bad guys with cheerful but relentless determination. The Coens also nabbed the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.
The film got a 94% "fresh" rating from Rotten Tomatoes, and even that dueling duo of Siskel and Ebert agreed it was the best film of 1996. It even lived on as a super-successful television series nearly twenty years later, with the acclaimed first season of Fargo premiering on FX in 2014, produced by the Coens.
How'd they do it? Well, in creating Fargo, the Coen Brothers just went back to their roots. They were two Minnesota kids, originally hailing from the Twin Cities Metro Area, so they didn't even need to do much research to capture the local vibe. They just followed the classic advice everyone gives out in creative writing classes and wrote what they knew.
And the result is a hilarious, chilling and brilliant film. Or, as they say in Minnesota: its "not too bad, then, yah?"
Why Should I Care?
Did we watch Fargo? Yah, you betcha!
Are we stuck doing the accent? You're darn tootin'!
Oh, the accents aren't reason enough to care about the movie? Ah, gosh. Oh, geeze.
Don't worry, though: you don't have to love doing an impression of a Midwestern-nice Minnesotan of Scandinavian descent to love this movie. In fact, it's almost impossible not to love Fargo… no matter where you're from, or what kind of accents you love trotting out. (G'day, mayte.)
Fargo explores the themes that have driven the Coen Brothers throughout their career as filmmakers—a sense of the absurd, human beings trapped by their own mad devices, and of the random windings of fate. The film goes deep into the mysteries of character. What are Jerry Lundegaard's motives for staging this kidnapping? What's going on in Gaear Grimsrud's head, and why does he love wood chippers so much?
Answer? No one knows.
And that's the thing about Fargo—it's a movie that's content to let you not know. It willingly shows you the brutal devastation of incompetence and petty-mindedness, without hammering home a moral. It shows you true decency and domestic love without holding it up as the end-all and be-all. It even introduces seemingly meaningless scenes—what's up, Mike Yanagita?—just to make the movie more complex.
The Coen Brothers can be seen as the crowning Absurdists of today's cinema… and they can be also seen as the crowning Realists. They show us a world that is both totally out of whack and totally relatable. These two bros consistently hit it out of the park when it comes to a wide, wide range of film specialties—they go from gritty noir to belly laughs as easily as James Bond's Aston Martin goes from zero to sixty.
And Fargo is widely considered to be their finest achievement: a movie that straddles the line between gloom and hope, gore and cuddles, and hilarity and what-hath-humanity-wrought existential angst.
And—oh yah—those accents are pretty much the best. Oh yah. You got that right.