Coen brothers' best

Rating: Null/10 (2 September 2005)

The twisted Coen brothers Joel and Ethan made a good movie here, so good it's ranked #84 on the American Film Institute's 100 best films list.
William H. Macy is a car salesman who plots to have his wife kidnapped so he can collect the ransom. Unfortunately, the nitwits he enlists for the kidnapping are both nuts and one is a bona fide psychopath.
As with most Coen films the plot is a Rube Goldberg contraption where whatever can go wrong does go wrong. Macy is sucked into a surreal situation. Frances McDormand plays a pregnant police woman who investigates local murders and eventually gets involved in the plot.
Fargo is part very black comedy and part horror film. The film is really good at mixing the very mundane everyday life of Frances McDormand with the extremely twisted lives of the kidnappers which gives the film a real scene of menace. There is a scene at the end involving a wood chipper that is really unsettling. Steve Buscemi is unforgettable as one of the bug-eyed kidnappers.