Fargo

Fargo's primary star to me, beyond the ineffable Frances McDormand, is the score.

Carter Burwell's score during the opening credits still gives me chills. It sounds rural at first, slight and down home, as warm and inviting to the viewer as the snow blasted landscape you're viewing during the credits is not.

Shortly after the credits begin, you see a car driving into the scene from far away, and the music begins to swell into an ominous and dramatic crescendo (which contains the scariest sounding sleigh bells ...) that completely shatters any illusions of quiet rural life for the viewer. The score serves during this sequence to tell you that EVENTS are gonna happen during this film. And the viewer sucks it up.

The Coen Brothers also are playing a very big joke on you with Fargo. They say at the beginning of the movie that the events which are depicted are based on truth. They ain't, except in the most vague of ways. The movie is manipulative, meant to make you view the human condition as tragic and petty, and if the viewer feels that the events up onscreen really happened, then so much the better. The score for the movie feeds right into that ... making you feel all the emotions the Coens want you to feel at the times they want you to feel them.

Only a skilled composer, or perhaps a brash one, could come up with a musical score to equal the manipulation being exerted by Fargo's visual elements. Burwell falls into both categories to me, and he's since become one of my favorite movie score composers as a result. His work illustrates to me how much more fun a movie can be when the music is as much an actor as the actors themselves, and the viewer is willing to let him or herself be taken for a ride.

OK, so we got a trooper pulls someone over, we got a shooting, these folks drive by,
there's a high-speed pursuit, ends here and then this execution-type deal.

Our local cinema has a students' night every tuesday, where old classics are pulled out of their dusty cupboards for a review... This weeks movie was...

Fargo

... And considering that didn't have a proper writeup as of so far - here goes nothing ...

In short

Fargo is one of the Coen Brothers' works. That automatically means odd humour, and this film is no less strange than, say, the big lebowski. Fargo, on the other hand, has a far larger degree of criticism to society built into it than Lebowski does.

Plot synopsis

In Fargo, Jerry Lundegaard is a car dealer who is short on money, and decides to have two hoodlums kidnap his wife, so his wife's rich daddy will shell out the ransom. Things go terribly wrong, and in a little Minnesota mountain village, and the kidnappers kill two kids and a police officer.

Carl (Steve Buchemi - you know, the short guy. Kinda funnylooking), and Gaear (Peter Stormare), the two kidnappers, turn out not having much in common, and quite some memorable situations occur as the pair do the kidnapping and subsequently decide to keep all the money to themselves.

Why the movie is worth watching

If you have a taste for black humour "I don't want more fuckin' pancakes, man. I want to go somewhere I can get a shot and a beer, and a steak, maybe. Hey, I know this place outside Brainerd where we can get laid." - "Look, I'm fucking hungry now, you know." - "O.K., we'll go get some fucking pancakes and then get laid", and you like other Coen Brothers movies, chances are that you will like this one as well.

A good dose of satire on the police system, ruthlessly making fun of Northern American rural life, and teenage hookers. This movie is probably deeply insulting if you belong to either of the mentioned groups - but even if you do, it is worth a few good laughs :)

Cast

• William H. Macy as Jerry Lundegaard
  
• Steve Buscemi as Carl Showalter
  
• Peter Stormare - Gaear Grimsrud
  
• Frances McDormand as Marge Gunderson
  
• Kristin Rudrüd as Jean Lundegaard
  
• Harve Presnell as Wade Gustafson
  
• Tony Denman as Scotty Lundegaard
  
• Gary Houston as Irate Customer
  
• Sally Wingert as Irate Customer's Wife
  
• Kurt Schweickhardt as Car Salesman
  

-30-