Good but...

Rating: 7/10 (25 September 2007)

This is a film many people think a lot about and try to read messages from in one way or another, when it seems it was just a nice film Coen wanted to make, end of story.
I liked the most of it: the woods, the winter, and with a pregnant cop(!) as the main character. Since I'm from Sweden, it was kind of cool picking up the Americanized Swedish names - Gustafson, Lundegaard and a couple of more - it gave the film a more specific, unique and not very often used location and background which was really nice.
There were not so good points however. I found the dialects too thick (they might talk like that in that are, I have no idea), the character development too shallow and the worst, too many loose strings and oddities thrown in. An Asian guy makes an appearance from nowhere, doesn't contribute and then disappears. The fate of a kid is never resolved, and so on.
However, the thing that really lifts the film are the actors, mainly Buscemi in his best role ever. William Macy is great too and Frances McDormand do well, if not great. Stormare has the weakest part, mainly because his character is almost mute. Not easy to work under such conditions.
So in short, I'd say this is well worth seeing after all. See it not as a Hollywood but as a well done school project.