Another overrated Coen brothers film

Rating: 4/10 (6 December 2013)

I really don't understand what everyone loves about this film. To me, it wasn't the film itself that was the problem, but the way in which it was told that was the major problem.
OK, so the basic plot is Jerry Lundegaard (William H Macy) is up to his eyeballs in debt and comes up with a plan to stage the kidnapping of his wife with 2 criminals Carl Showalter (Buscemi) and Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare). He arranges for them to kidnap his wife and then he intends to extort money from her wealthy father Wade Gustafson (Harve Presnell) and split the extortion money with his criminal counterparts, but things don't quite go according to plan;
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For me, one of the biggest problems lay with the character of Jerry Lundegaard. One of the basic rules of film making is Character Development and this was the biggest failing of the film. We get pretty much zero character development from Jerry - we learn that he has money problems, but we never know why or how this has come about? As its based on a true story, we could probably find this out through Wikipedia or Google, but that's not the point. The Coen brothers should have explained this so that we could at the very least 'connect to the protagonist'.
Then there is the ridiculous kidnapping scene; Jean Lundegaard (Kristin Rudrud) is in the living room watching TV and sees a man with a balaclava approach her house - she sees him for a good 10 seconds but just sits there and doesn't do anything and one of the kidnappers peers through clear glass and looks all across her lounge, but fails to see her stood up in the living room (is he blind??) and then he smashes the door with a baton. I suppose her not doing anything could perhaps be put down to shock. But then it gets worse.......
The second kidnapper kicks the front door through (with ease) and then both men chase her up to the bathroom and the 2 men struggle to get through a standard internal wooden door (logically an internal door would be weaker than a front door) yet it took 2 of them and a crowbar to get through the bathroom door, yet one kick from 1 kidnapper sees the front door go flying to the floor....... come on!!!) Then whilst the kidnappers are 'struggling' to get through the bathroom door. I use the term 'struggling' loosely as that would not happen in the real world. Jean opens the bathroom window and hides behind the shower curtain - to make it look as though she had escaped through the bathroom window - (good idea), but just when you are about to think that an ounce of plausibility is kicking into play what happens? She jumps out from behind the shower curtain (for no reason) with the shower curtain attached to her face, falls down the stairs and gets rendered unconscious and the kidnappers take her away. WTF? Why not just stay behind the curtain and wait till they leave? With Jean's initial cunning double bluff they never would have known.
Anyway, swiftly moving on to good parts of Fargo and one of the plus points for me was the pregnant police officer Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand). Her and her dopey sidekick did provide some comic relief and some tension to proceedings, but if I'm honest even Gunderson's character and her relevant investigations were a little under utilised.
I think the main problem with this film is the way that the Coen brothers have told the story; no motivation for his character's behaviour (expect for money - surely there must have been more to it than that). The way the kidnapping scene was depicted was also preposterous as far as I was concerned.
In summary, this had its good moments (mainly McDormand and Buscemi), but it's let down by numerous absurdities and a lack of sympathy for Jerry Lundegaard. The Coens admit themselves that 'many of the events' were based on what actually happened rather than 'all of the events' (which helps to explain the numerous absurdities in the plot - I never did feel that this entirely rang true whilst watching it). This had the potential to be great, but the lack of a decent back story for Jerry Lundegaard meant that I could never connect to his character meaning ultimately that I couldn't connect to the film. This had the potential to be great, but ultimately it was just a waste of 100 minutes.