Fargo (1996) – Chiswick Cinema Film Club – Review by Andrea Carnevali

Chiswick Cinema Film Club is on September 23. Get your ticket now: chiswickcinema.co.uk/movie/fargo

Fargo

★★★★★

The Coen brothers’ masterpiece is a film of snow, murder, stupidity and, somehow, profound goodness

This is really a film of contrasts. Warmth against cold. Decency against greed. Enormous landscapes against tiny people. Horrific violence against ridiculous behaviour. And, perhaps most importantly, the ordinary against the absurd.

It’s also, for me, the Coen brothers’ masterpiece.

The film begins by solemnly informing us that the events we’re about to see really happened in Minnesota in 1987 and that, at the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Except, of course, none of that is true. Joel and Ethan Coen simply understood that audiences behave differently when they think a story really happened. We become more forgiving of coincidences, bizarre behaviour and strange little details that we might otherwise accuse a screenwriter of inventing. In other words, the Coens start directing us before the first shot has even appeared.

What follows is a film that’s hard to pin down. Is it a crime thriller? A police procedural? A black comedy? A domestic drama? A film noir? Well, yes. Somehow, Fargo is all of them at once. And one of its greatest achievements is the way the Coens move between comedy and shocking violence without ever signalling the gear change. One minute you’re laughing at somebody’s accent and awkward politeness; the next, something genuinely horrible happens.

At the centre of it all are two characters who barely occupy the same world.

Jerry Lundegaard is a man who seems to want more. More money. More status. More independence. More recognition.

Marge Gunderson, on the other hand, seems perfectly happy with enough.

A husband she loves. A warm house. Some breakfast. A job she’s good at. A painting of a mallard that might end up on the three cent stamp.

This distinction is really the whole film.

Jerry destroys everything because what he already has can never satisfy him. Marge survives because she understands the value of ordinary things.

William H. Macy is magnificent as Jerry. I particularly love watching him lie. The forced smiles. The hesitations. The little repetitions. The nervous movements. The increasingly desperate attempts to appear reasonable while his entire world is collapsing around him.

McDormand’s Marge is his complete opposite: calm, practical, curious and fundamentally decent. Her Oscar win for this film fits like a glove.

Visually, the Coens reinforce this contrast once again.

Jerry is often trapped behind desks, boxed in by architecture, dwarfed by rooms or squeezed between people. He seems increasingly imprisoned by the mess he has created.

Marge, by contrast, gets breathing room: clear compositions, stable frames. She belongs in the world in a way Jerry never quite does.

Then there’s Roger Deakins’ extraordinary cinematography.

Minnesota becomes this vast, almost featureless expanse of white. Cars are reduced to tiny black dots. People disappear into the landscape. Roads stretch towards nowhere.

It’s almost film noir turned inside out. No darkness, shadows or alleyways. Just white.

Everything is exposed.

Carter Burwell’s music adds another layer.

The characters in the film might be ridiculous, but the score never laughs at them. It’s mournful, grand, almost mythological. Burwell treats these pathetic little human dramas as tragedy.

This contrast is crucial because, beneath all the accents, woodchippers, kidnappings, murders and absurd behaviour, I actually think Fargo is an incredibly humane film.

Perhaps even an optimistic one.

In the end, this is a film about goodness: goodness is making breakfast, doing your job properly, supporting your husband’s painting, coming home at the end of the day and lying beside somebody you love.

And maybe that’s why Marge seems so genuinely baffled by everything she discovers in the film. She just cannot understand why anyone would destroy so much in pursuit of so little. As far as she’s concerned, life already has everything that really matters.

And maybe that’s why, almost thirty years later, Fargo still feels so warm despite all that snow.

I’ll be showing Fargo for my film club this Wednesday, the 23rd of September, at The Chiswick Cinema. You can buy tickets here.

Andrea Carnevali is a Bafta winning film maker who lives in Chiswick, and a co-creator of the Chiswick In Film festival.