pointless and offensive

Rating: 1/10 (21 February 1999)

FARGO is its own worst critic. Supposedly based upon true events, the plot is glacial and pointlessly violent and the characters are either half-realized or irrelevantly annoying (what do the fantastically exaggerated accents of several characters have to do with anything?) or both, which one presumes is intended to reflect the film-makers' vision of reality. Fine. But it's one thing to point out such a vision of reality in a film (successfully accomplished in, say, BADLANDS); it's another for a film to actually BE this vision of reality. FARGO is a dog-and-pony show, a trick film, intended to make a meta-fictional point by exploiting the film-viewer's pre-supposed moral vacuousness and lurid fascination with sex and violence. In short, it is not a film of substance and the point is that, truly in the sense which the Coen brothers mean it, only insubstantial, "half-realized characters" could be fans of it (naturally, to realize this point is to be "realized" and no longer be a fan). Looked at this way, FARGO is brilliant, but still only in the most menial, kick-'em-when-they're-down sense of the word.