Books, Arts & Manners: Forgo Fargo

THE Coen brothers’ Fargo is their best film so far, which isn’t saying very much. Everything the brothers have sprung on us has been far-out, arbitrary, and vastly overdone. Some of it was merely attitudinizing and bad; some of it, like Barton Fink and The Hudsucker Proxy, asinine and insufferable. Fargo could have been a nice little film noir if they hadn’t compounded it with black comedy, absurdism, and folksy farce: Scandinavian-American Midwesterners up, or down, to their hickish shenanigans.

Some of this, surprisingly, works; some of it ranges from the unpalatable to the indigestible. It may be that all these paltry denizens of hyperborean Minnesota (and, in a few, brief scenes, North Dakota—or what passes for it) really exist like this: living and talking in slow motion, saying, “Let me fix you some eggs,” five times over, and profusely punctuating their speech with yah and jeez. Marge Gunderson, the pregnant small-town police chief who is the film’s hero as well as heroine, manages at one point three jeezes in a row, which is cheesy enough to make you check your cholesterol. Inasmuch as she is a smart one underneath, one wonders where the line between homage and patronization may lie, if indeed it exists.

JS

About the Author

John Simon

Featured Tags

THE Coen brothers’ Fargo is their best film so far, which isn’t saying very much. Everything the brothers have sprung on us has been far-out, arbitrary, and vastly overdone. Some of it was merely attitudinizing and bad; some of it, like Barton Fink and The Hudsucker Proxy, asinine and insufferable. Fargo could have been a nice little film noir if they hadn’t compounded it with black comedy, absurdism, and folksy farce: Scandinavian-American Midwesterners up, or down, to their hickish shenanigans.

Some of this, surprisingly, works; some of it ranges from the unpalatable to the indigestible. It may be that all these paltry denizens of hyperborean Minnesota (and, in a few, brief scenes, North Dakota—or what passes for it) really exist like this: living and talking in slow motion, saying, “Let me fix you some eggs,” five times over, and profusely punctuating their speech with yah and jeez. Marge Gunderson, the pregnant small-town police chief who is the film’s hero as well as heroine, manages at one point three jeezes in a row, which is cheesy enough to make you check your cholesterol. Inasmuch as she is a smart one underneath, one wonders where the line between homage and patronization may lie, if indeed it exists.