Still to be topped by the Coens, or really by anyone else for that matter.

Rating: 10/10 (7 January 2009)

I still think Fargo is the Coen brothers' crown and glory, even after seeing some of their more popular films such as The Big Lebowski and Millers Crossing; not to mention recent best picture winner No Country for Old Men. Such a film can be revisited and enjoyed every now and then, delivering a powerful experience revolving around some pretty desperate characters in a location ice cold and seemingly cut off from the rest of the world.
One of the many reasons I frequently revisit Fargo is its attention to detail and the manner in which it comes across as an art film. There is so much going on both on and below the surface in the film and yet it doesn't need to bash you over the head with vast visuals in order to tell you this. On the surface, Fargo is a very quaint and slow burning crime drama revolving around an organised kidnapping and a ransom deal that goes awry. The film is one of few that I suppose comes to near perfection, in most every aspect of film-making. The cinematography, the screenplay, the intensity of some characters and the quirkiness of others, the attention to each character as an individual different to everyone else and the tiny things like the attention to sound that compliments the visuals.
I said the location was cold and felt cut off from the rest of the world. In essence, most of the characters are like this. They are self obsessed and do not stop to think about others until it is too late, the incidence that demonstrates this is when events instigator Jerry Lundegaard (Macy) sits in his house's hallway and contemplates how everything got to the level of awfulness it's now at in the film. Other characters are victims; others are phoney aggressors that mutate into real aggressors and others are innocents tragically caught up in the middle.
The film is about pregnant police chief Marge Gunderson (McDormand) as she attempts to piece together what happened following the shooting of a state trooper after he pulled over a car. This event is connected to the arranged kidnapping of Jean Lundegaard (Rudrüd) by her husband Jerry so that he can quench his thirst for greed and automatically inherit a lot of money from his super-rich father in law. The shooting of the trooper is a significant event; it sparks a change in both genre and focus, shifting the perspective from Jerry and his criminal buddies to Marge and her quest to just figure things out for herself. The film carries its crime related establishment over into a detective strand, but maintains enough of a focus on both to deliver a riveting and harrowing tale.
The film begins with Jerry meeting both Carl Showalter (Buscemi) and Gaear Grimsrud (Stormare) at a bar, again in the middle of nowhere. He lends them a car and gives them the heads up on the plan; he is also very late for his appointment which could be seen as a pre-cursor to the string of badly timed and miss-matched events that follow. It is one man's desperation and greed that signals the chaos and Jerry is that man. "It was a mix up, I guess" says Jerry; one of many more to come.
It's easy to just sit and watch in awe when viewing Fargo, even on a repeated viewing. The Coens pay specific attention to the crime genre but also to comedy, black comedy, best seen when Jean is in the process of being kidnapped and panics amidst the shower curtain before falling down the stairs and knocking herself out. Additionally, upon arriving at the log cabin, she panics some more and rushes around whilst bound and blind thus falling over a log and hurting herself again. It is the bizarre image of someone trapped in a shower curtain and running around in the snow with a sack on their head juxtaposed with the situation that is the kidnapping and the two kidnapper's reactions to these events.
But additionally to this, the Coen brothers pay specific attention to realism. When at the night club bar, Carl tries to get the attention of a waiter who cannot hear him and walks off and it's these tiny, tiny focuses on the unnecessary that just push the film into a boundary of the brilliant, you're convinced these people may be real in real places doing real things. But to see the film is also to hear it. Witness the snow falling gently or the wind blowing minutely; the use of the television show playing as one kidnapper makes their way up the side of the house much to Jean's surprise and horror. It is the attention to sound as well as the visual that truly packs the punch which hits home with Fargo, a juxtaposition of sound and imagery as we feel the same emotions of surprise and fear etched on a character's face.
I am pleased the Coen brothers have had the success they've recently been through as when they keep within in the realm of the crime or gangster genre, things usually go very well. Their branching off into comedy rarely works for me, but seems to give many others a kick so that's all well and good. But if they ever do match Fargo, and they have come close, then the spectacle will truly be one to witness.