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Parent Issue
Month
May
Year
1996
Copyright
Creative Commons (Attribution, Non-Commercial, Share-alike)
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Agenda Publications
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[1996. Directed by Ethan Coen. Cast: Frances McDormand, Steve Buscmi, William H. Macey. Gramercy Picture. 97 min.] 

It's been difficult what to make of Barton Fink's winning an unprecedented three awards - including the Golden Palm - at Cannes in 1991. By nearly any objective standard, Fink would seem to be one of the least distinguished films to win this prestigious film award in the last decade.

By contrast, the Coen Brothers' first film Blood Simple is a faux-noir classic. Their homage to the gangster film Miller's CrossIng is at least as polished a piece of writing as Fink. And Raising Arizona is far more entertaining. Only the recent Hudsucker Proxy mars their track record.

What makes Barton Fink unique - and quite probably the source of its international success - is the surreal 1940s Los Angeles which Joel Coen crafts in the film. Fink is one of those peculiar cinematic realities that can exert a hypnotic hold on its viewer. A writer's nightmare on a serious nicotine day, Barton Fink is like visiting some fresh hell for a stray couple of hours

Brother Ethan's Fargo doesn't sink to Fink's psychological subterranean depths, but it does run a few healthy laps around Hades' outer circles. Minneapolis car salesman Jerry Lundergaard (William H. Macey) hires kidnappers Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi) and Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare) to nab his wife, Jean (Kristin Rudrud). The plan is to squeeze $80,000 out of his father-in-Jaw, Wade Gustafson (Harve Presnell), so that he can pay off some unspecified debts.

What Lundergaard doesn't account for is the tenacity of nearby Brainerd Police Chief Marge Gunderson (Francis McDormand). After Grimsrud reveals a psychotic temperament and the kidnapping gets botched, the pregnant Chief Gunderson thinks her way through the various subterfuges that salesman Lundergaard throws in her path. Between bouts of morning sickness, Gunderson proves to be a resourceful rural crimebuster as she unravels one of the sickest rashes of homicides ever to afflict the great white tundra.

The Coens are rather resourceful themselves. Fargo's based on a kidnapping mass murder that gripped the imagination of 1987 northern Minnesota. Any skewed caper that left five people dead from gunshot wounds, bludgeoning, and decapitation, would definitely be something to remember. As re-written by both Ethan and Joel Coen, it's a Midwest mystery weighted in equal measures of stupefied cupidity and by-the-books forensics.

Each character in the film is half-hidden in shadows. We're only told enough to keep the story in play. And, as such, Fargo's quirks reflect careful observations of everyday life. It's this unexceptionalism that makes the banality of these murderous events so horrific.

Through it all, McDormand's Police Chief Marge Gunderson is an admirable heroine. Her Gunderson waddles about gamely surveying the remains of a highway massacre that defies reason. Relaxed with her authority, yet vigilant of all occurring about her, Gunderson is one chipper law enforcement officer.

On the other hand, Macey's smarmy Lundergaard and Buscemi's brash Showalter take a distant place to Stormare's silently malevolent Gaear Grimsrud. In what may be the performance of a lifetime, Stormare defines pathological nihilism with an accuracy that is frightening.

The most devastating aspect of Fargo is that Gaear Grimsrud's inner emptiness and Jerry Lundergaard's casual selfishness could indeed be true. By passing fiction for criminal history, the Coens surpass their previous works' horror by simply sticking to the facts.

 

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