Dir: The Coen Brothers
Cast: Steve Buscemi, William H. Macy
Roger Ebert once said that "Films like Fargo are why I love the movies." It's incredible what Fargo does to you, or at least, what it did to me the first time I watched it. What is it about Fargo that is so good? I felt the same way as Ebert felt when he watched the film. There came a point in the movie when I realized, at age 16, that I was watching one of the greatest movies that I've ever seen. It just came to me like that and I didn't even finish watching it. But Fargo's approach is so subtle, so simple that it's seductive. It invites you into this imperfect world about a simple, greedy man who is trying to make a couple thousand bucks but goes about it in the wrong way, completely. It's a movie about simple people in a simple, unexpecting town that gets rudely awoken by two very bad men. I don't want to call them evil... Anton Chigurh is evil. These are just very bad people and the wrong type of people that you wanna get involved with.
Unfortunately, Jerry Lundegaard had to be that person. He is a desperate, pathetic person who in some ways is just as bad as those two criminals in that he doesn't even fully understand what kind of mess he's getting himself into. In that way, he's scary. He genuinely believes that what he is doing is the necessary thing to do. He wants to stick it to his father-in-law. He wants a piece of his money. But to have your wife kidnapped in the process? What kinda man would do such a thing? Jerry doesn't understand the world of crime. He thinks it's a simple 1-2-3 step process. He was never going to get a piece of the action, he was always going to get screwed over because he's a naive son of a bitch. That's what makes him so pathetic.
The one that brings this movie together in such a beautiful, pitch-perfect fashion is Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand). She represents the happy-go-lucky folksiness of the region that she lives in with her cheerful demeanor and her "Minnesota nice" accent. But Marge also happens to be very smart. She's actually a brilliant police officer who is able to use different clues, in things that are totally unrelated, in order to successfully solve the case. There is just something beautiful about watching how Marge goes about her day as a police officer, solving this very violent and disturbing case. Just watching her eat lunch with her husband at a cafeteria or order food at a fast-food place is something special to watch. Frances McDormand completely embodies this character and makes us care about this story. Without her, the movie would be filled with contemptuous, disdainful people. The Coen Brothers know this and brilliantly add her into this story in such seamless fashion.
In fact, everything that The Coen Brothers do in this movie, every step they take is perfectly executed. Believe me when I say that in this 98 minute movie, there isn't a single imperfect shot. Everything in this movie is done to perfection, the plot is so tightly-wound and watching it unfold is a thing of beauty. This is the film that made me a film lover. It's the film that made me want to make films and write about films. Fargo is a perfect film, the single greatest movie of the 1990s.
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