#84. Fargo (1996)

It's rare that you get to call a bloody, dark movie "fun" or "cutesy" but "Fargo" is exactly these things. Maybe it's because I have always had a darker sense of humor, or maybe it is just because I come from a hick town with naive people and an inept police force and this movie hits very close to home.

Whatever the reasons, there is a lot of beauty, artistry and an almost ironic depth to its plot and its characters. It is part drama, part comedy and part satire- it is one of the only films I've never been able to categorize or label and I think that is what sets it apart from any other movie.

William H. Macy plays Jerry, a hapless car salesman, who is, for lack of a better term, the quintessential schmuck. He is in deep financial peril and about to be on the ass-end of a real-estate project that he has managed to screw up. He stupidly assumes his rich father-in-law will give him a nearly one-million dollar loan. In an attempt to get the money he cooks up an ill-conceived scheme where he hires a pair of two-bit criminals to kidnap his wife in order to collect a ransom from her father, give the abductors a small percentage and dig his way out of his financial rut. What should be a routine traffic stop in Brainerd, Minnesota leads to a dead state trooper and two dead witnesses... Marge Gunderson, the very pregnant local police chief is brought in to investigate and hilarity ensues!

The unique aspects of "Fargo" lie not only in the grim subject matter from which humor is drawn, but also in the fact that there are some amazing snow-covered landscape shots, where snow had previously only been used in films to express something bland and hopeless, as in "The Gold Rush" or "The Empire Strikes Back." One scene in particular where Jerry is making his way through a perfectly symmetrical parking lot is filmed so far overhead that at first glance it looks like some sort of map or chart, and it isn't until you see a tiny object moving along that you realize exactly what it is. Another example of this occurs when one of the failed kidnappers is burying the ransom money in a snowy field to go back and retrieve later- sprawling horizon-to-horizon shots of identical looking fence posts illustrate the vastness of the frozen plains and what would previously have been seen as just a cinematic blizzard winds up looking more like cinematography you would have seen in a John Ford western.

Oh for Pete's sake, he's fleein' the interview! He's fleein' the interview! (Marge Gunderson, "Fargo")

The thing I found most charming about "Fargo" is the absurdity of it all. The fact that Marge is the only competent officer on the whole force (so much so she has to point out that a licence plate listed as "DLR" on a police report means it is a dealer plate rather than the actual plate number), the amount of killing that the kidnappers end up being forced into in order to NOT get caught, the exaggerated politeness of virtually every character and the fact that according to this film, everyone in the entire midwest talks like Sarah Palin all come across as so far-fetched that you realize it is being used for comedic effect.

Another scene that I absolutely adore features Jerry's wife, hands tied behind her back and blindfolded, attempting to make a daring escape from her captors. In numerous films from the 70's and 80's this would be a dramatic and ultimately heartbreaking situation, however in "Fargo" a more realistic perspective is given as she stumbles around foolishly and keeps falling down in the snow as one of the kidnappers laughs hysterically.

"Fargo" walks a very thin cinematic line in that it finds humor in so many different extremes, from simple little jokes ("Did you hear about the guy who couldn't afford customized license plates so he changed his name to J3L2404?") and laughs that are culled from the characters' general innocence to the absolute ridiculousness of someone running another person through a wood-chipper or someone getting shot through the jaw in a gunfight with a senior citizen. From now on, whenever I refer to a movie as "ridiculous," chances are I will mean it as a compliment thanks to this movie.