"... and I guess that was your accomplice in the wood chipper..."

Rating: 9/10 (7 October 2006)

It's funny how the simple word "Yaaah" sounds so dimwitted in the movie, yet turns out to be one of the few affirmations of normalcy in a maelstrom of frenzied lunacy. "Fargo" is the quintessential film of how a bad idea can only get badder (worse?) when put in the hands of inept bunglers who can just about taste a big payday. What happens to them is a sort of poetic justice, but there's nothing as lyrical or pretty as poetry going on here.
Here's a movie where you can't picture any of the principals being portrayed by anyone else. It's the perfect meld of characters, dialog and situations that domino from one disaster to another with eerie precision, and the unsettling feeling that yes indeed, as nuts as it all is, this is something that could actually happen.
For whatever reason, I haven't seen a lot of the Coen Brothers pictures. I came across "The Big Lebowski" a couple of weeks ago, and decided to catch this film today to keep the streak going. I'm suitably impressed by their quirky characters and bizarre, colorful plots to keep on going. Bitingly original, they leave one somewhat disturbed, but curious for more.
Frances McDormand, William H. Macy and Steve Buscemi are stand out in their roles here, but except for a few brief minutes shared by Macy with each of them, their characters never really appear together. Chalk it up again to the story tellers who move things along in spite of the hapless Jerry Lundegaard, someone we can all relate to whenever things we can clearly see in our head just don't quite turn out the way they're planned. Poor Jerry, he never even came close; kind of makes you wonder how he ever became the executive sales manager.
Say, I wonder if Gaear (Peter Stormare) got his inspiration from Paul Bunyan?