Good and evil, crime and punishment, law and grace. With Fargo, the Coen brothers realized that these existential concerns didn’t need to be conveyed via gangster-movie theatrics or haunted-hotel atmospherics. A wintry, mundane stretch of Minnesota highway will do.
I don’t mean it as a slight to their previous movies to say that Fargo is where their craft fully matured (after all, I like Miller’s Crossing even more). Yet there is a calmer command on display here, a firm belief that the ideas they’re interested in will resonate on a banal stage merely by force of their cinematic prowess. Not that Fargo is dull. Essentially a neo noir, with murder and mayhem resulting from one dimwitted car salesman’s attempted VIN scam, it’s nevertheless familiar in a way their previous features are not. Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy), the panicky salesman increasingly in over his head, is our everyman spiritual surrogate, frantically scraping the ice off his windshield before he’s frozen in place by his sins.
That scene—a comic tour de force on Macy’s part—also demonstrates the physicality of coldness that the movie captures. The crunch of boots in snow, the fog of breath in the air, the heavy burden of sweaters and parkas, gloves and hats—all of this seeps into your skin until it chills your bones. Similarly, you can almost reach out and feel the frigid dampness of the hazy, white-gray horizons that seemingly stretch forever down the side of the road. Cinematographer Roger Deakins emphasizes the “middle space” that opens up when melting snow merges with the atmosphere. It’s otherworldly (maybe even transcendent thanks to Carter Burwell’s billowing theme), a strange place in between our drab world and … somewhere better, perhaps, but likely somewhere more brutal.
Out of that vague mist emerges Marge Gunderson, police chief of Brainerd, Minn., where the initial murders take place as Jerry’s scheme begins to unravel. Pregnant, cheery, and perceptive, Marge (Frances McDormand) waddles among the corpses undeterred. McDormand’s comic timing is impeccable (especially in her folksy “interrogation” of Jerry), but more important is her ability to imbue Marge with a gentleness that makes her the sole figure of decency in this harsh, violent world. (I guess her quiet, caring husband, played by John Carroll Lynch, might be another.)
Fargo has its filmmaking flourishes—as well as some Tarantinoesque tomfoolery involving Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare as bickering kidnappers—yet this time Joel and Ethan Coen choose not to foreground them. It’s a movie of villainy and virtue on the screen, but also deep in its soul.
