Fargo (1996)

Fargo arrived in 1996 wearing a deceptively plain coat. Marketed with the tagline "a homespun murder story," it looked, on the surface, like a modest regional crime picture, set against the flat, frozen landscapes of Minnesota and North Dakota. What it turned out to be was one of the defining American films of the decade: a pitch-black comedy of errors, a procedural thriller, and a quietly humane character study, all running simultaneously on the same 98-minute track. The film opens with a title card claiming the story is based on true events (it isn't, not really, though the Coens have always been cagey on the matter), and that small piece of misdirection sets the tone perfectly for everything that follows.

Joel and Ethan Coen wrote and directed the film under their usual arrangement, Joel in the director's chair and Ethan producing, though in practice the two have always operated as a single creative unit. By 1996 they had already built a reputation for films that were stylistically sharp and tonally difficult to pin down, from the sun-baked Texas oddity Raising Arizona to the genuinely unsettling noir of Blood Simple. Fargo was produced by PolyGram Filmed Entertainment and Working Title Films, the latter a British outfit that had by then become a significant player in transatlantic cinema, and it represents something of a high-water mark for both companies. The screenplay, written by the brothers, is spare and precise, drawing on the rhythms of Midwestern speech in a way that is affectionate without being condescending. Every "you betcha" and "oh yeah" lands with a kind of gentle comic weight.

The casting is, frankly, exceptional across the board. Frances McDormand plays Police Chief Marge Gunderson, a figure who is warm, competent, and thoroughly decent in a film full of petty greed and spectacular incompetence, and her performance won her the Academy Award for Best Actress. It remains one of the great screen performances of the nineties, and if you want to see her in similarly strong form in something more recent, her work in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is well worth your time. William H. Macy is extraordinary as Jerry Lundegaard, the desperate, sweating car salesman whose scheme to have his own wife kidnapped unravels with grimly inevitable momentum. Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare make for a brilliant pair of hired hands, one chatty and frantic, the other almost catatonically quiet, and Harve Presnell brings a cold authority to the role of Jerry's wealthy father-in-law. The ensemble is polished but never showy, each performance calibrated to a shared key.

Coen Brothers smash it out the park again. It's crazy because I first watched this like 20 years ago and I remembered not liking it much at all. Watching it again as an adult it's absolutely brilliant. The pacing is perfect. It's the perfect length and it's gripping from start to end. The scripting is great. The story is good. I mean honestly it's just a very very good crime film.

I think what strikes me most, rewatching this one, is how disciplined the whole thing is. The Coens never let the comedy swamp the menace, and they never let the menace drain out the warmth. Marge is such an unusual figure for a crime film, genuinely good-natured and unflappable, and the film trusts her completely. It's a reminder of what the brothers do better than almost anyone working in the same space, and if Fargo has got you in the mood for more from them, both Burn After Reading and True Grit are well worth a look on this site. Some films improve with age. This one just quietly sits there, doing its job, and doing it brilliantly.

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

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Trailer

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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)