Review: "Fargo" Sizzles In The Snowy Plains Of North Dakota

Oh, Geez, we got a black comedy crime classic on our hands!

May 1, 2022

On a Los Angeles freeway in 1994, a white Ford Bronco harboring suspected murderer and American icon OJ Simpson led police on a low-speed chase. The event was shocking, not only as indirect confirmation of guilt few wanted to believe, but because it was so unlike what one would expect from a seismic cultural moment. Unfortunate disruptions to regularly-scheduled programming aside, it was an anomaly. Between the twists and turns of Bullitt’s San Francisco rundown or The French Connection barreling through the crowded streets of New York, we knew car chases much differently than OJ.

It was not hustle and bustle, breaking the speedometer and shoving the gas pedal through the floor: this was a slow, meandering autumn cruise towards the LA sunset, a stroll to the Rockingham Avenue estate the football legend called home. It was a road trip masquerading as a mad dash to freedom.

Oddly, that subversion is what made the event so dramatic. There were no explosions or screeching tires whipping into a U-turn on a busy freeway. The SUV wasn't rigged with explosives that would detonate if it dipped below 50 mph. The bizarre contrivances Simpson employed in the backseat to establish innocence went unheard and unseen by the American public. All we had was a car, cruising down the freeway, wondering when and how everything would come to its inevitable conclusion.

Few filmmakers realize the drama in that simplicity, that what truly captures us isn’t melodrama, but truth. Simpson’s chase was compelling because it was low-speed, suspending us in mid-air, filling in every blank with our imagination, and forcing us to come to the moment, not the other way around.

Ostensibly, Fargo is the story of Marge Gunderson, a North Dakotan police officer working to solve a triple homicide. In reality, that is only a backdrop for a masterclass in making a movie, making it mean something, making it say something, and making it last.

Fargo will not thrill or captivate. It is not a massive epic or an indie movie that prioritizes style over substance. It's a master of small moments that feel familiar and how they create a compelling drama when strung together. We have all bickered with retail employees over hidden fees and fine print, lashed out at others over for which we are responsible, and feigned excitement over a phone call from an old friend we have no interest in seeing again.

But Marge does see him again, for reasons that are neither immediately clear nor masked forever so viewers can bat them around long after the credits roll. Fargo doesn’t let us dive into its thematics and decide its meaning and purpose for ourselves. It doesn’t make direct statements that we can agree or disagree with but cannot refute as objectively false. It doesn’t waste its time, starting with all it plans to be as Jerry meets the two kidnappers in an off-road bar and being the same thing as the screen fades to black.

Many movies either waste time or add more to compensate for squandering it, but not Fargo. It gets its characters. It understands that Jerry is not the sort of man to seek melodrama, so developing him with it is pointless. He is desperate for validation and immoral in his measures to get it, but is subtly unaware of this.

Nothing truly happens to Jerry. He has no a-ha moments to shock him to reality or imbue him with self-awareness. He has conversations. He insists on not delving into his personal problems in the same breath he negotiates an ill-conceived kidnapping plot to seize ransom from his father-in-law. His disregard for his son, suffering at his mother’s sudden disappearance, is a passing thing because it is a passing thing. Jerry has not thought of it, so we have not thought of it. He can only get clued in by a matter-of-fact remark that reminds him Scotty even exists.

Without this nonchalance, Fargo cannot be the many things it is. It cannot be a black comedy or a crime film. It cannot be dramatic or thoughtful. It cannot expose or understand anything about the people it depicts or people in general. It cannot convince us Jerry’s wife would sit idly by, staring silently as a masked man ascends the outside steps and peers into her house. It cannot convince us a woman would see someone roll out of the car dealership as slowly as Jerry and freak out that he’s “fleeing the interview.” It cannot convince us a professional criminal would be so lax in his intimidation tactics as to say he’ll have to “ya know, shoot ya.”

But it does convince us. It convinces us because it captures that Midwestern simplicity without condescending to its subjects. It isn’t an exercise in self-belief, where the pompous intellectuals pen a screenplay about the lowly plainsmen with only the bare minimum brain cells needed to function.

It is that simplicity that wins out. It is not the greed or violence or striving for some unattainable reality by any means necessary. It is not some capitalist principle that dictates competition is king, and all is fair in the spirit of that competition. It’s that simple idea of finding the bright side and seeing that how things are is all they need to be, whether it’s a postage stamp art contest or being content without money at the expense of all else. It’s Marge’s simplicity that gets things done.

She doesn’t crack the case by pondering the meaning of life or piece together the mystery by silently stewing over a minor detail from days earlier that could’ve opened the whole thing if she’d only thought about it sooner. It isn’t some revelatory moment where she struts through the police station with the answers locked inside her brain, filing into her office and flipping through paperwork as the audience sits with bated breath to see if she’s thinking what we’re thinking.

It’s real life that solves the mystery. It’s those vague eyewitness testimonies from overeager good Samaritans that generalize the perpetrators. It’s the old friend who lets you in on the gossip of that other old friend. It’s the moments that leave themselves open and let us come to them, forcing us to tap into our minds instead of laying out the path for us. Marge finds herself facing down Gaear at the cabin because the very simplicity she lives by led her there: everything is visible if we stop diving too far down to see it.

The man was “funny-looking, in a general kind of way;” Lundegaard did have more up his sleeve, and she wouldn’t have realized it had Mike’s lie about getting widowed by Linda Cooksey not gotten exposed. These things we write off as good-natured idiocy are the things that ultimately matter most.

That’s how it is. We behave as though life needs us to mean something, like without our imprint it’d just be a function of the universe, but it doesn’t need us. We need it. We need to seek out all of its adventures and unravel all of its mysteries. We need to make our mark and establish our legacy. Life doesn’t care about this: life can’t care about anything. The world won’t stop spinning just because we do.

Fargo understands that. It knows its people simply live and breathe and work and die. It knows they don’t make history, or news, or any trouble at all. For that, Fargo is real, even in the moments where the server drops something off at the worst moment possible, or someone wants to sit too close and we have to cut through the ensuing awkwardness. It’s real when something definitively ours gets stolen by someone else, when we bat around whether or not the hubby makes us eggs, or when we can’t quite fit those last yard trimmings through the wood chipper.

But for how real it is, Fargo is still dramatic. It builds its tension so quietly you don't realize it's there until Marge creeps around the side of the cabin and sees Gaear disposing of Carl in the wood chipper before his mad dash through the snow. You don’t realize how much you’ve invested until you get the payoff.

Fargo is observation instead of dissection. It lets its hero be goofy and unfamiliar without losing her humanity or her capability as a cop. It’s off to the races from the very beginning and never wastes a syllable. It is everything that makes a movie good, but pushes further to become everything that makes a movie great. It wraps up every loose end and smooths every rough edge. It leaves no stone unturned and then turns them back again. It realizes that what leads us to discovery is always what creates the very things that get discovered. We cannot know the folly of the villains without understanding that the people chasing after them are doing just fine.

Marge never questions the life she leads. She never empathizes with Jerry, Gaear, or Carl. She never understands why anyone would ruin such a great day over a little bit of money. Fargo understands that what life has to offer is what leads us to realize what life has to offer, and the people who cannot accept that are the fools, not the people who embrace it. It is not hustle and bustle; it doesn’t veer from the path of a woman and her child at the last moment or screech its way through the City by the Bay. It drives slowly but with greater purpose than we even realize as we watch it, internalizing things until it ends as we thought it would but with more going on than it seemed at first glance. Maybe OJ needed a little Fargo, though, with Marge Gunderson on the case, the outcome would have been a little bit different.