Aside from arriving late to a widely attended party, there's also a considerable amount of pop culture cache attached to Fargo. While it isn't as widely referenced or spoofed as many other classics (Psycho, The Shining, Citizen Kane, etc.), there have been plenty of times where I'm watching a TV show or movie, and there's a Fargo reference, and I have to chuckle along based on the little I knew about the film. It's an interesting bind for film aficionados: there's an awareness of great movies that precedes actually seeing them, allowing their relevance in pop culture and film history to be appreciated, even understood, without actually being internalized, or deeply, personally felt.But that's all context.
Fargo is every bit as good as I expected it to be. It's a treat to see such a highly respected movie and to not be disappointed. Sometimes, expectations can hamper your appreciation for a movie. I'm thinking of film reviewers who check out Citizen Kane for the first time and slap it with an 8.5 out of 10. It's times like those that you feel a disconnect from the film-loving world, a sense of not getting it, a feeling like you lost something despite never having it. Luckily, that wasn't the case here.
This is quintessential Coens, with that strange pervading darkness, the effective mixture of humor and gruesome gore, the brilliant performances the brothers always manage to get from their actors. The cast is fantastic. Frances McDormand makes Marge so pleasant and supportive, a faithful wife and excited mother-to-be despite the reversed gender roles in her home, so perfectly demonstrated in the breakfast scene when she first enters the film. Marge is almost too polite, even while conducting her investigation, which seems to be a product of something in the water in these snowy rural areas.
Which is perhaps what makes Fargo such a unique cinematic experience: the sense of place. The misty, overhanging whiteness, the eternal stretch of snow in all directions (making the issue of where to bury a million bucks pretty difficult to crack), the empty stretches of road all build a sense of isolation and desperation that and makes the oh-yah-know good manners and goofy dialogue extra unnerving, like the film is taking place on the moon rather than a few states away. Having such brutal violence and selfish grabs unfold in the pristine snow makes for a heightened reality, and provides a nice clean canvas for the copious bloodshed, most notably in the famous wood chipper scene.As I imagine will be the case with all the movies I watch as part of My Classic Summer, it's idiotic it took me so long to finally watch Fargo, but now that I have, I'm excited to revisit it and plant it even more firmly in my filmic repertoire.
Excellent review! I especially like what you said about what makes this distinctively a Coen movie and the strong sense of place. And your comment about the show providing a clean canvas for the copious bloodshed is hilarious.
ReplyDeleteThis is one of my all-time favorite films, and I shied away from it for years just because I'd heard about the infamous wood chipper scene. :-) When I finally saw the aforementioned scene, as these things often go, it was anti-climatic. I actually laughed a bit. "So I guess that was your partner in the chipper?"
It was strange, because it's a movie that's pretty integral to pop culture, but I went in knowing next to nothing (other than the wood chipper scene). It's nice to be able to take in these great giants of cinema pretty blind. That scene really epitomizes that weird Coen intersection of hilarity and violence. They do it like few others can.
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