After the scraper-sized flop that was The Hudsucker Proxy (although, let it be known, it remains a work of genius) the Coen brothers return to territory previously found fertile. Put simply, Fargo is Blood Simple with laughs and a heck of a lot of snow. But Fargo is far from simple, it is a deliciously convoluted tale of crime, punishment and a cowardly used-car salesman set in a white-out snowscape of Minnesota, written and directed with the verve, painstaking nuance and outrageously black humour that have become the mainstay of a Coen movie.
The story is based on truth, or in Coen parlance "real-life". It opens in Fargo, a hick-town, where in a bar fogged with cigarette smoke, desperate, cash-strapped car dealer Jerry Lundegaard (Macy) hires a misbegotten duo of thugs (Buscemi and Stormare) to kidnap his wife. He can then cajole her loaded pop (Harve Presnell) to stump up the ransom and make a killing. The problem is, a killing is exactly what is made. Mishap follows mess-up into a brilliantly plotted farce of lies, confusion and hilarity.
This is the Coens' paean to the middle-America of their youth, and, thanks to McDormand's heavily pregnant police chief Marge Gunderson, has the most heart of any of their films. With big-hearted motherliness and a sharp nose for wrong-doing, she traces the inept brigands and fraught Lundegaard to a bloody conclusion. The Coens have such an ear and eye for the myriad quirks of human life that throughout Fargo's movie-sized absurdity - events take an increasingly corpse-strewn spin out of control - there is a constant sense of plausibility to it all.
Script-wise it's an expected - by Coen reputation - joy, with not a cliche nor clunker to be had and an irrepressible playfulness with language, especially the spittle-spilling Scandinavian originated names of the region. Acting-wise, too, it hums with class. Buscemi does his finest rendition of the put-upon, whining geek yet, Stomare manages to elicit pure menace with scattered grunts and stares, and McDormand's chirruping, waddling Marge - a true original - is a career best.
Director Joel Coen recalls Blood Simple's expansiveness in a solemn world of endless snow and from Marge's unfortunate class reunion to the Psycho reference in the kidnap scene mixes the real with the oddball without showing the joins.
