Review on Fargo
An unsuccessful car salesman, an unfoolable police woman and a needless crime gone wrong are the bases of the master piece that is “Fargo (1996)”. The film starts with a rather epic car drive in what looks like the middle of nowhere all white snows and plains giving us the feeling that Jerry Lundegaard (man driving) is some sort of hero and possible protagonist. As the film goes on we find out that Jerry is the “intellectual” author of his wife’s kidnapping, not that there is anything intellectual about Jerry or the plan, as the film develops. Everything seems to be going wrong until Marge Gunderson (Margie) appears and contrasts everything Jerry stands for, while 7 months pregnant she manages to decipher the turn of events in a single scene and also show the audience how nice and loving is her marriage.
We can clearly see three storylines in the film, there’s Margie’s side: good police-work, loving wife and helpful husband, friends who love her, you get the idea of her being the moral center of the story specially with her last lines of “I just don’t get it” referring to why do people commit crimes. Then there’s the actual hitmen who represent all the dark humorous violence that encompasses the film which I believe don’t have any actual relevance to the main story so much as to portray the perverse and most dark side of the American culture: money, sex and booze is the only thing this characters seem to care for. Of course there is also the -debatable, main story: Jerry’s side which shows his amazing ability to screw all his plans and ridiculous attempts at finding money all along having his obviously broken marriage, son and father in law, clueless.
The beauty of the film falls on the characters, the story itself is all so confusing and seems to be so out of focus that we don’t even know why Jerry needs the money in the first place. Small roles seem bigger than they are because they are so unique, the wife appears in only two or three scenes and attains a whole personality or the prostitutes with their Canadian-American-Scandinavian accents and their “yah”, even the whole scene with Yanagita (a doubtlessly big question mark for anyone who’s seen the film). The Coen brothers took a seemingly plain boring places, jobs and families and made the whole audience question the reality of it all.
Playing with a “true story” as we’re told at the very beginning reality was elevated into a human comedy, is it true? Could this possibly happen? Should I go to midwestern USA and start looking for the money?
Crime, marriage, good, evil, success, failure. This themes along strong cheerful folksiness make the unravelling of the not-so-mysterious crimes of the quiet Fargo a film worth watching.