An almost perfect film in its genre.

Rating: Null/10 (28 January 2003)

I had watched "Fargo" several years ago, and just last night re-watched it on DVD. I intended to see half of it, go to bed at my normal time, and see the last half this morning. But it isn't that kind of movie. It draws you in, the dialog and editing are so good, you want to keep watching. And so I did. It deserves its high rating.
some SPOILERS follow, don't read further if you haven't seen "Fargo" yet.

Bill Macy is perfect, absolutely, as "Jerry" the car sales manager who can't quite get his life in order. You see, Jerry basically cares only about himself. He has some unspecified debt, his father in law (Harve Presnell) is rich but has a very low, deservedly, opinion of Jerry. So Jerry does the only thing he can figure, through a paroled American Native car mechanic that works in his dealership gets hooked up with two thugs (Buscemi and Stormare) who will kidnap Jerry's wife, hold her safe, until Jerry convinces pop-in-law to pay a ransom, which he uses to pay off the thugs and erase his own debt. Ever the schemer, Jerry tells the thugs he will split $80,000 with them, but really plans to extort $1Million and just give them $40,000. In an early scene to establish character, we see Jerry scamming a customer by charging him for a "topcoat" treatment that he said a day earlier he would throw in free. Jerry was simply a very flawed person.
Things go terribly wrong, thugs get stopped at night in the snow, Stormare shoots the cop, plus two passers by who are tracked down after witnessing the crime scene. Margie (Frances McDormand, oscar winner) is the town sheriff and gets on the trail. She calmly travels to the Twin Cities, interviews people, pieces together clues, finds the hideout near the lake, comes upon Stormare grinding up Buscemi's body, the dead hostage in the cabin. In the interim the father in law gets gunned down, as well as a parking lot attendant.
This film is best classified as a very dark comedy. Margie and her fisherman husband are two of the very few normal people in this film, The others - Jerry, his family, the mechanic, the thugs, the prostitutes - are all way off center, and some of the situations and dialog are very funny, within the context of a film where a number of murders are committed. The funniest scene is during the shooting of Presnell, who wounds Buscemi on the right cheek, and he spends the rest of the film with rather large strips of paper stuck to his face to stop the bleeding, his hands and coat collar red and blood-soaked. I mean, there's really nothing funny about murder, but the Buscemi character is very funny.