Prairie Home Companion Goes Feral

Rating: Null/10 (7 July 2006)

Fargo is a combination of Prairie Home Companion, In Cold Blood, Abbott and Costello, and The Great Gatsby.
Jerry, through an ex-con (Shep) in his auto dealer's shop, hires two losers he doesn't know to kidnap his emotionally stunted wife to secure a ransom out his wealthy, domineering father-in-law, purportedly to relieve Jerry of some ambiguous financial difficulties, which we have no difficulty believing that Jerry has brought upon himself through his own stupidity and neurotic venality. He thus sets in motion two losers, who buy into the scheme, much as a Florida retiree buys into some new aluminum siding. When Jerry hires the losers, it's invincible stupidity meets invincible stupidity, but the losers live in a native world of casual violence, casual sex, and casual death, a world unfamiliar to Jerry, who lives trapped in his closed make-believe world of suburban Minnesota chirpiness, Lutheran uprightness, and nuclear family happiness.
Once Jerry unleashes his stupid plot, he squirms and wriggles as the losers bungle and bully their way into Minneapolis, kidnap his wife, and attempt to collect the ransom. When they're finished, 7 people have died violently, a million dollars has changed hands, 3 hookers have been banged, countless beers consumed, and Jerry ends up in cuffs on a bed in a dingy motel outside Bismark, North Dakota. The sheer incompetence and casual violence of Jerry's henchman attract the law, in the person of the irrepressible Marge ("You betcha!"), who is led inevitably to Jerry's auto dealer office to ask about a certain "tan Cierra" with dealer plates, used by the killers to traverse the great Northern Tundra of winter-time Minnesota to find bars, screw truckstop hookers in cheap motels, kidnap suburban housewives, and extort a million from upper Midwest Masters of the Universe like Jerry's father-in-law. You're darn tootin'!
With the exception of Marge, and her univocal husband Norm (who paints duck stamps), none of the characters comes off well. Their overriding characteristic is their overpowering banality and stupidity, relieved in the end solely by mindless, undirected violence. The pathological interaction between the two kidnappers reminds one of In Cold Blood, although these kidnappers are not explored in any depth, their pathologies nonetheless on full display to the modest, introverted personalities of northern Minnesota. Their mere presence attracts interest, and, finally the law. Ya know?
The Cohen's brilliance lies in the conception of intersecting Jerry's eminently phony life and character and his petty, overblown and self-absorbed middle class problems, with the casual violence and nihilism of the kidnappers, who although they are perfectly willing to work a deal for American cash have business methods of their own, methods that Jerry doesn't want but to which in the end Jerry casually acquiesces. When Jerry places the frozen body of his now dead father-in-law into the trunk of his car, and then drives into his suburban garage, Jerry's character is writ large. The contrast between the smarmy Prairie Home Companion accents, households, restaurants, and manners of Jerry's world and the brutal, unashamed profanity of the kidnappers -- and their inevitable merger in the character of Jerry -- keeps the plot moving to its dullish, inevitable end.
Because no character is great in this movie, there is no tragedy. Its characters are actually embodied emptiness, whether its the slimy Jerry, his stunted wife, the emotionally sadistic father-in-law, the nihilistic kidnappers, Marge's empty-headed police partner, Marge's old high school buddy, or the air-headed truckstop hookers. There is in fact no morality or transcendence anywhere in this movie, except perhaps in the final triumph of Marge's dogged goodness and simple intelligence. The only great characters in the movie are the painters, the Hautmans, against whom Norm competes in the duck stamp competition, but who never appear. Neither does their work. True greatness has no place in this world; it can only be talked about.