“Fargo” came out April 5, 1996, after less than a month in limited release.
It was a critical and commercial success that won Academy Awards for Best Original Screenplay and Best Actress in a Leading Role. It is still so popular that it recently spawned a critically acclaimed TV show.
“Fargo” starts with the story of Jerry Lundegaard, a nervous car salesman who masterminds the kidnapping of his own wife. He hires two somewhat inept and colorful criminals for the job. The mistakes they make attract the attention of pregnant police chief Marge Gunderson, an expert crime solver.
This movie is a marriage of excellent visuals and great dialogue. The Coen brothers, the film’s directors, frequently use long shots and overhead shots to emphasize their locations’ snowy beauty. The Coen Brothers also wrote this film, and you can tell they love language. Early in the film two characters riff on the word “lot” in a hilarious way that feels organic to their conversation, not like two writers using characters to show off.
My favorite thing about “Fargo” is its tone. The Coen Brothers are great at making movies with bleak tones, such as “No Country For Old Men.” They’re also great at making movies with really light tones, such as “Hail, Caesar!”
The tone of “Fargo” shifts from funny to scary to sad every 10 minutes or so. More than anything, its tone is very human. The characters do not feel like cliches, but rather like people you’d meet.
The sequences involving the criminals Lundegaard hires, Carl Showalter and Gaear Grimsrud, are a good example of this tone. They bicker about where to eat, act more realistically than most hitmen in movies and commit memorable acts of violence. The Coen brothers even find several poignant moments that make you pity them.
In a lesser film, they would have had a few funny lines and served mostly to set the plot in motion. In “Fargo,” they display a wide swath of human emotions.
The warmer sides of this tone are perfectly embodied in the character of Gunderson. She is cheerful and very good at her job. The love she shows for her husband Norm is always heartfelt and sweet.
More than anything, she is nice. She is not fake nice like Lundegaard, but instead exudes a general warmth and interest in other people. She is someone you’d like to talk to on a cold night at the end of a long day.
Frances McDormand plays Gunderson in one of my favorite performances. I have seen 919 movies in six years, and Gunderson is one of the nicest and most interesting characters in any of the movies I have watched.
McDormand won an Academy Award for her role in “Fargo,” and she definitely deserved it.
“Fargo” still holds up after 20 years. Its visual beauty and mastery of a unique tone make it an American masterpiece. It is the type of movie you can’t wait to see again after you finish watching it.
