Snowblind

Rating: 9/10 (1 March 2005)

***SPOILERS*** The weird kidnap plan in the movie "Fargo" was hatched at the "King of Clubs" bar in Fargo ND. Ex-cons Carl Showalter & Gaear Grimsrud, Steve Buscemi & Peter Stormare, meet with Brainerd Minn., The home of Paul Bunyan & the Blue Ox, car executive Jerry Lundergaard, William H. Macy, in this half-baked plan to kidnap his wife Jean, Kristin Rudrud. All this in order to secure a $80,000.00 ransom from her dad Wade Gustafson, Harve Presnell, who's one of the richest men in Brainerd.Jerry and the two hoods were brought together by a mutual friend ex-con Shep Proudfoot, Steve Reevis, who not only spent time with both Carl & Gaear in the Stillwaters State Pen but also works as a car mechanic at the dealership that Jerry is working at and who his father-in-law Wade owns.
Like the off-the-wall misfits that they are the plan goes to pot as soon as it's executed with a bungled kidnapping of Jean and later that evening the murder of a state trooper, James Saulke, and two windlessness who happened to come on the scene, J. Todd Anderson & Michelle Suzanne LeDoux, by the somewhat unstable Gear. Jerry needs the $40,000.00, his half in the deal, to replace money that he embezzled from the car dealership that he's working at. As the movie "Fargo" go along it's marry way it, the money that Jerry embezzled, rises to almost $400,000.00.
After the murdered bodies of the three victims of Gaear's rampage are discovered the police chief of Brainerd Marge Gunderson, Frances McDormand,is called into the case. Marge slowly gets all the evidence together and puts it in place thus cracking the murder/kidnap mystery wide open. Marge is a lot like TV's Let. Colombo, at first you don't for a moment realize that she's a policewomen much less the Chief of police in Brainerd County.Later her street, or lets say country, smarts and bulldog determination makes you as well as everyone else watching the movie believers long before the film "Fargo" is over.
Homely looking with an enormous appetite, due to her being pregnant, Marge slowly gets to the bottom of the murder mystery by zeroing in on Jerry who she felt was keeping some very important information for her. He doesn't realize that a car, a tan Ciera that was spotted at the murder scene,is missing from his car lot and that one of his workers Shep was in cohorts by phone with the two ex-cons! Shep received a phone call from the bar-motel where the two were staying at.
Jerry tries to be cute even with his fellow partners in crime by upping the ransom to one million dollars without them knowing about it and insisting that he deliver the goods,the one million dollar ransom, by himself; so he can keep most of the money to cover his string embezzlement's at the car dealership. The entire scheme backfires when Wade insists that he handle the ransom pay-off, after all it's his money, that leads to him to getting shot and killed by an outraged Carl who was in turn is shot in the jaw by Wade before he died.
At the hideout with Gaear and the kidnapped Jean, Carl also tried to cheat Gaear out of the Million by giving him only $40,000.00 of the ransom, It's hen when Carl finds thats Gaear murdered Jean and ends up getting split in half and murdered himself with an ax by his insane partner.
Meanwhile Marge closes in on the gang and has Jerry on the run and out of the state, he's later arrested by the cops at a motel in Bismarck ND. Gaear is also captured by Marge as he tried to hide the evidence of his crimes, the bodies of Jean & Carl, by chopping them to pieces with a wood-chopping machine.
Even though the movie "Fargo" has it's share of thrills and excitement it also has it's touching moments too. One of the most moving scenes in the movie has to do with Marge meeting an old high school friend of hers at a local Minneapolis hotel restaurant Mike Yanagita, Steve Park. Mike goes into a whole song and dance about him working for the Honeywell Corp.as an engineer and how he lost his wife Linda, who Marge also knew from high school, to leukemia. Unable to talk anymore Mike begins to break down right in front of the startled policewomen sobbing uncontrollably. Later Marge found out that Mike was never married and doesn't work for the Honeywell Corp. and has been living with his parents since he left high school.
If Mike was honest about his feelings to Marge, as well as any of his other friends, he would have easily gotten the sympathy that he wanted instead of being a phony to both Marge as well as to himself.