Fargo movie review & film summary (1996)

Marge Gunderson is one of a handful of characters whose names remain in our memories, like Travis Bickle, Tony Manero, HAL 9000, Fred C. Dobbs. They are completely, defiantly themselves_in movies that depend on precisely who they are. Marge is the chief in Brainerd, Minn., still has bouts of morning sickness, eats all the junk food she can get her hands on, speaks in a “you betcha” Minnesota accent where “yeah,” pronounced ya, is volleyed like a refrain. She's a natural police officer, very smart; at the crime scene she quickly and correctly reconstructs what happened, and determines there were two killers, one big, one small. Her male partner, not so swift, fails to realize that “DLR” indicates a dealer plate; that inspires one of the movie's famous lines: “I'm not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your police work there, Lou.”

“Fargo” (1996) was directed by Joel Coen, produced by Ethan Coen, co-written by the brothers, and set in the Scandinavian-American upper Midwest where they grew up. It begins with the information that it is “based on a true story,” and ends with a disclaimer that its “persons and events” are fictitious. It's fiction; “true story” is an ironic stylistic device.

But “Fargo” is true to the rhythms of small-town life. When Marge Gunderson stands at the first crime scene and counts three dead bodies, she correctly intuits that the perpetrators are not from Brainerd. Venturing to the big city on her investigation, she asks a friend for a tip on a good place to eat, and is steered to the buffet at the Radisson. Jerry Lundegaard is as trapped by his sales manager's job and his implacable father-in-law (Harve Presnell) as any character in Sinclair Lewis; he's juggling a stolen car and a double fraud (he will tell the kidnappers they're splitting an $80,000 ransom but tell his father-in-law the ransom is $1 million). His son bolts away from the dinner table to meet his friends at McDonald's. His wife, Jean (Kristin Rudrud), works furiously at every household task, chopping, stirring and knitting as fast as she can.

Against these domestic details, the crimes stand out as amoral and violent. There are ugly moments. Everyone remembers the scene where Stormare (who once played Hamlet for Bergman) pushes his partner's leg into the wood-chipper. More heartless is the scene where poor Jean, blindfolded and barefoot, tries to run away in the snow, and Buscemi laughs at her. There are also the shootings, sudden and merciless (“Oh, Daddy!” says Buscemi, shocked by the first one). Against this Chief Marge uses folksy small-town cheerfulness as a tool for prying criminals loose from their secrets.

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