Fargo (1996)

Some films get better with age. Not in a wine-metaphor, chin-stroking way, just literally: you watch something as a younger person, it doesn't click, and then you come back to it twenty years later and wonder what on earth was wrong with you the first time. Fargo is exactly that film for me.

I genuinely didn't rate it much when I first saw it. I couldn't tell you why. Maybe I wasn't paying close enough attention, maybe I was in the wrong mood, maybe I just wasn't ready for it. But watching it again recently as a fully grown adult with a functioning brain, I can only say: this is brilliant. Properly, confidently, wickedly brilliant.

What the Coens do here, and what they've always done at their best (I've loved them since Blood Simple), is make something that looks deceptively simple on the surface. A desperate man hires two criminals to kidnap his wife so he can claim the ransom from his wealthy father-in-law. That's your premise. It sounds almost farcical, and parts of it are, but the film never lets you forget that real people are getting hurt. The comedy and the horror sit right next to each other, sharing a seat, and the Coens never let either one swallow the other whole.

The pacing is something I want to talk about because it's rarer than it should be: this film is exactly as long as it needs to be. Not a scene too many, not a moment wasted. It moves with a kind of quiet confidence. There's no hand-wringing, no padding, no third-act bloat. It arrives, it does what it came to do, and it gets out. The script is sharp and specific in a way that makes almost every scene feel alive. The dialogue, the silences, the strange deadpan humour of it all. It earns every laugh and every wince.

And then there's the performance at the centre of it, which I don't want to gloss over. Frances McDormand as the pregnant local police chief is one of those performances that makes you recalibrate what good acting actually looks like. She's warm and funny and quietly ferocious, and the film belongs to her completely by the end. The contrast she provides against the bungled, bleak violence happening around her is what gives Fargo its strange, beating heart.

I keep coming back to the word "gripping" because that's genuinely how it felt. Even knowing roughly where it was all heading, I was locked in. The snowy Minnesota landscape, rendered in that flat, grey, freezing light, gives the whole thing a feel unlike almost anything else. It's bleak but never nihilistic. There's warmth in this film, buried under all those inches of snow, and it's the warmth that makes the darkness worth sitting with.

If you're a fan of the Coens more broadly, it's worth having a look at my take on Raising Arizona, which scratches a similar itch in a very different setting. Same gift for finding absurdity inside genuine human desperation.

Fargo is just a very, very good crime film. I'm not sure I need to dress it up beyond that. It's funny, it's dark, it's brilliantly made, and it completely won me over on a second watch after doing nothing for me the first time. Sometimes you need to meet a film when you're ready for it. Four and a half stars.

Rating: ★★★★½  | Year: 1996  | Watched: 2025-05-17

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Joel Coen: Blood Simple (1984) · True Grit (2010) · Raising Arizona (1987) · Burn After Reading (2008)
More with Frances McDormand: Blood Simple (1984) · Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) · Burn After Reading (2008)
More from United Kingdom: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Shinjuku Boys (1995) · The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) · Blue (1993)
More from the 1990s: Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Shinjuku Boys (1995) · Blue (1993) · Cemetery Man (1994)
More crime: A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Angst (1983) · Stolen Face (1952) · Cairo Station (1958)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)