Don’t Eat the Red Snow : Joan Dean looks at Fargo
The last time I screamed in a movie theatre was twelve years ago during Blood Simple. Usually it isn't the audience but the tormented characters created by the Coen Brothers who do the screaming. In Raising Arizona the Snopes brothers utter one of those sustained, unearthly howls as they’re reborn in the mud after tunnelling out of prison. Barton Fink hears screaming, preternatural wails, from his seedy hotel room. Those screams are less out of fright than out of ultimate exertion, rage, despair, or futility.
Joel and Ethan Coen are auteurs pas commme les autres, like no others. Only a handful of film-makers, ones much more powerful and better known, exercise as much control over their films as do the Brothers Coen. All six of their films to date are original scripts written, produced and directed by the boys from Minnesota. Their chemistry is decidedly weird, not least because the Coen Brothers navigate treacherous waters between the bizarre and the boring.
The Coen Brothers are a step beyond the film school graduates, Steven Speilberg, Martin Scorsese, et al., who reshaped American film in the 1970s and 80s. Like the film school generation, the Coen Brothers have an encyclopaedic film sense that eclectically evokes the sprawling history of American cinema. Mining the motherlode of film genres, particularly screwball comedy and film noir, what they come up with is wholly original rather than simply derivative. Often, however, the Coen Brothers can mercilessly manipulate audience emotions; rarely do they deliver conventional happy endings.
Their first film, Blood Simple (1984), has a plot that clearly anticipates this year’s Fargo. Not only does the severely underestimated Frances McDormand appear in both as the central character, but Fargo revisits familiar film noir elements of Blood Simple--marital unhappiness, fast-money schemes, hired killers, labyrinthine plot twists. Fargo, unlike its precursor, is set down not in the heat of a Texas summer but the frozen tundra of dead winter in Minnesota.
Things go wrong in these films. Human interaction is rife with misunderstanding. The dark side wells up. Wallpaper peels. Blood is everywhere. And people are screaming, howling, baying.
In Raising Arizona (1987) the Coen brothers produced the finest film comedy of its decade. Here a tiny baby is pursued by escaped convicts ("He’s our baby too," avers Evell Snopes), a bounty hunter from hell, aggrieved parents, the FBI, jealous friends, and loving but infertile ("her womb was a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase") kidnappers.
Miller's Crossing (1990) created Tommy Regan (Gabriel Byrne), a man struggling to hang onto his hat and his decency in an overtly corrupt demimonde. In the end he doesn’t get the girl, doesn’t get rich, but he walks away with his literal and figurative debts squared and his hat still on his head.
Like Robert Altman’s The Player, Barton Fink is a brilliant exploration of the business of movies--slick Hollywood producers, power lunches, neglected writers selling their souls in Southern California. Barton’s stage plays celebrate the common man. He will, he insists, forge a new bond between art and the average Joe by sensitively portraying life as it truly is. Having finally found success on the Broadway stage, Barton Fink is persuaded to work under contract to a major Hollywood studio. Eschewing the glitz and glamour of LA, Barton holes up in the only hotel in Los Angeles plagued by mosquitoes. And who should appear but the common man, incarnate in the person of Mad Man Muntz, a serial killer who specializes in decapitation.
Three years ago in The Hudsucker Proxy the brothers took on the genre of the screwball comedy and elicited from Jennifer Jason Leigh a great although largely inaccessible performance. Here too a dark, grinding secret lies behind the facades of success and power.
Like the earlier films, Fargo dwells on the proximity of the insipid and the horrific, the mundane and the outrageous. Set in Middle America, which was not only home to the Coen Brothers but where they are most at home, Fargo has characters who say things like "You’re darn tootin’", others who curse as if they’re in a David Mamet play, and others who lapse into unexpectedly Biblical speech such as "Blood has been shed." Somehow we believe them all. (A friend of mine from Minnesota was especially impressed by the authenticity of the regional accents, which might easily be mistaken as wildly hyperbolic.) Much of Fargo takes place not in its eponymous locale but in the small town of Brainerd, North Dakota, Home of Paul Bunyan. So it’s tall tales we’re prepared for and it’s tall tales we get. We’re also told that it’s all true: "Out of respect for the dead," the opening titles inform us, "the story has been told exactly as it occurred."
Occupying a strange middle ground between conventional Hollywood realism and Biblical parable, Fargo shows how easily America juxtaposes its dreams and nightmares, its humour and horror. Protagonist and antagonist both experience that easy movement from a secure, cozy world of domesticity to the depths of depravity. One is a car salesman; the other a small town police detective. But this detective named Marge, and she's not only female but seven and a half months pregnant. (When was, you might ask yourself, the last time you saw a pregnant woman in a film?) By night she snuggles down with her hubby as they await the birth of their child. By day she investigates triple homicides between bouts of morning sickness. Marge and her husband, Norm, are filled with little kindnesses towards each other. Norm insists on cooking his wife eggs ("You gotta eat a breakfast") before she heads out to investigate the crime. She picks him up a supply of night crawlers. He brings her a lunch and the next day accompanies her to a 8,000-calorie smorgasbord. While she ventures into the frigid expanses of Minnesota in February and then on to the big city, Norm works on his paintings of ducks.
John Guare derived the title Six Degrees of Separation from the notion that every human is linked to every other human on the planet through no more than six contacts. In Fargo it seems to be closer to three. Jerry Lundergaard and his wife might live next door to Marge and Norm. But Jerry does know a mechanic who knows some startlingly bad men who are all too eager to kidnap his wife in exchange for a new Cutlass Ciera and $40,000. And as they will, things go badly from the start. Jerry meets his kidnappers at a bar in Fargo but they were expecting him an hour earlier. They even try to talk Jerry out of his plans.
Jerry is full of schemes to make money. He’s married a woman whose father has lots of it, but his father-in-law Wade recognizes Jerry as a very small boy wearing a man’s suit. Jerry has one scam going with some cars pilfered from Wade’s dealership. He’s got another swell idea for a "sweet deal" in developing a parking lot. And Jerry has his master plan -- the abduction of his wife -- that will net him a quick forty grand and cost him nothing more than a stolen car. "This is my deal here," he insists, but no one takes him very seriously.
Jerry may have had to go to Fargo to find his kidnappers, but sleaze, hustlers, and deception are always at hand. Even in the depths of rural Minnesota, the hired thugs have as little trouble finding prostitutes as they do pancakes. At the blink of an eye, we move from a humdrum, okey-dokey world to one of unspeakable terror. From the chaos of the kidnapping, we move directly to enforced tranquillity of Wade’s business office. A television documentary about subterranean beetles takes us from the killer's lair to Marge’s bedroom--after all, they’re watching the same programs. And Jerry, the criminal Marge pursues, inhabits a world much like her own--middle class home, tidy world, strong regional accents.
And there are two brilliant vignettes interpolated in the midst of the story. The first is Marge’s interview with two young college drop-outs who serviced the killers on their way into Minneapolis. The girls are so clueless, so overly made up, so devoid of common sense that you can see, among other things, just what’s wrong with American higher education today. The second is a poignant reunion between Margie and Mike, her high school friend. Time hasn’t been kind to Mike, not least because, no matter how carefully planned, rekindling a romance with a woman seven months pregnant is never easy. Worse, Mike relates that his wife waged but lost a brave fight against leukemia. It is a touching moment. It is also a complete sham.
And Mike isn’t the only one for whom lying is a way of life. For Jerry it’s a profession. With well-practised boredom he resists the outrage of a conned customer. With unctuous smooth talk, he puts off Marge and an investigator who's uncovered another of his frauds. Jerry truly is little more than a child (and William Macy is perfectly cast to play him). His boyish looks have weathered middle age, but three times Jerry throws temper tantrums--lashing out at his car windscreen with his ice scraper, hurling the papers all over his office, flapping his arms against his sides in exasperation. Although he’s a professional liar, Jerry is not a very good one. And that will prove his undoing. When he’s finally apprehended, he sobs on the bed like an anguished seven year-old.
Margie acquits herself with stellar marks. As she sits in the car salesman’s tidy office glancing at his increasingly frantic doodles, bathed in the supposedly soothing muzak, she recognizes the man behind these crimes. And she will remind the killer she arrests that he should have known better. All this murder, she tells him, "and for what? A little bit of money. There’s more to life than a little money. Don’t you know that? And here you are and it’s a beautiful day." Yes, for Margie it is a very beautiful day.
Frances MacDormand is not only superb in the role, but the role itself is superb. Here we find a competent female cop whose pregnancy underscores her intrinsic if unsophisticated goodness. She and her husband measure time only in their anticipation of their child’s birth. What others waste their energies on--murder, money, sex, scams -- seems so banal, so worthless, so inconsequential that she and we wonder why they bother.
For all their genius, their encyclopaedic inventory of cinematic techniques, their astonishing plots and amazing dialogue, the Coen Brothers have never had anything resembling a box office smash. They’ve made money, but they’ve never had a film that made great profits; critical praise has been lavished on their films, but they’ve never been nominated for an Academy Award. Fargo is unlikely to change that but only because, like its predecessors, it confounds our expectations by putting the humour in the horror, the nightmare in the dream.
Joan Dean teaches at the University of Missouri, Kansas City.