Fargo

Rating: Null/10 (11 November 2012)

There are two iconic shots toward the end of Fargo, both featuring Peter Stormare's character, the reticent, cold-blooded criminal-for-hire, Grimsrud. The first finds him reacting shockingly to the revelation on a daytime soap opera he's watching that one of the characters is pregnant. The second discovers him, as does the film's very pregnant heroine, Officer Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand), forcing the leg of his newly deceased accomplice, Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi), through a wood chipper. Both shots are emblematic of the film's continual interweaving of the humorous with the macabre, and both reveal how the black comedy of Fargo, which is as oddly frightening as it is gut-bustingly funny, is achieved. Grimsrud's intent reaction to the soap opera revelation occurs right next to the carelessly discarded, motionless body of his kidnapping victim, Jean Lundegaard, and right before Showalter bursts in with a bullet-torn face. Jean Lundegaard's likely murder and Carl Showalter's facial wound have both resulted from a botched scheme engineered by Jean's hapless husband, Jerry (William H. Macy). Jerry, who looks and speaks like a leprechaun, possesses the qualities of a leprechaun's evil twin; he is as unlucky as he is selfish and stupid. But he has the air of middle-class decency about him; earlier, he joins his wife in earnestly scolding their son for using foul language. Apart from a minor plot (he intends it to be a "no-rough-stuff type deal") to kidnap his wife and collect the ransom from his father-in-law, Jerry appears to be the workingman head of a warm, happy household: close, comfy, and cozyâ€”much like the tube sock that still quirkily adorns Carl Showalter's foot, as the rest of his leg grinds its way down into the bloody, snowy abyss beneath the wood chipper. The disturbing violence in Fargo draws additional unsettlement because it disturbs representative objects and scenes of domesticity: soft, comfortable clothes, a routine traffic stop, a suburban parking garage, a housewife knitting while she watches a daytime talk show, and the most representative symbol of domesticity: a proclamation of pregnancy on a daytime soap opera. Like the slightly sub-standard American English dialect spoken by most of its characters and its slightly sub-classical Carter Burwell score, the Coen brothers' slightly off-center crime dramedy works beautifully; Fargo makes us laugh uncomfortably and cringe, as extraordinary crimes infringe on ordinariness. We cringe, but we don't look away; this film is extremely entertaining and, therefore, extremely, though disturbingly, watch-able (and re-watch-able).