Smart,stylish,frozen film noir from the Coen Brothers

Rating: Null/10 (31 August 2004)

Just when the ultra-ironic, ultra-violent thriller seemed to have been done to death by Tarantino and his acolytes, along came the Coen brothers to breathe fresh life into the genre.
David Mamet-favourite Macy is wonderfully weak and wicked as Jerry Lundegaard the Swedish-American car-salesman whose attempts to mastermind the perfect crime - the kidnapping of his wife - go horribly, violently and hilariously wrong. For a start he has hired two trigger-happy crooks, the verbose Carl (Buscemi) and the taciturn Gaear (Stormare) to carry out the kidnapping. Pretty soon people are starting to get shot and this attracts the attention of the smart, pregnant police chief Marge Gunderson (McDormand, who deservedly won an Academy Award for her tough, funny, touching performance).
With its central plot strand of the well-planned crime spiralling wildly out of control, the film investigates similar territory to the Coen brothers' brilliant debut Blood Simple, but Fargo is a more assured work, lighter and more layered. The cast, boasting at least three scene-stealing performances (Macy, McDormand and Buscemi), are on top form. The film manages the neat trick of trumping Tarantino by not merely being filled with laughs and slickly handled, literally visceral action sequences, but also presenting rounded, recognizably human characters.