Carl's fate is to get beat up, shot and eventually reduced to nothingness, while his counterpart, Gunderson, grows in stature as she is led, indirectly, to the killers. Fargo may be the Coens' best film since 1987's Raising Arizona , closing the circle with the earlier film by shooting in a white desert, as opposed to a painted one. Fargo is film blanc , for the locations, as well as for the flatness and lack of inflections in everyone's voice. He's so full of smothered rage that he has to excuse himself to go have a private, shuddering fit of temper. The recurring figures of human emotional blocks in the Coens' films may have something to do with growing up in Minnesota, as the filmmakers did.
British reserve has nothing on Minnesota reserve.
Fargo depends on indirection as well as direction for its impact. Keeping the film as free of the most obvious machinery of crime movies as possible, we hear an account of a confrontation secondhand instead of seeing it. In one dryly comic scene, a rural bartender calls Gunderson to report an incident that might contain a clue to the murderers she seeking. Then he asked me what I thought of that. A simple reading of Fargo would be to consider everyone in it a boob, but that ignores the fondness underneath the precise vision.