by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The other day I had picked up seven movies from the bargain
counter at Big Lots, including some films I’d never seen before but were
sufficiently important parts of America’s cultural landscape I felt I should —
and number one on that list was Fargo,
the well-regarded 1996 semi-thriller by brothers Joel and Ethan Coen (Joel got
sole directorial credit — though Ethan did some uncredited work on the
direction, according to imdb.com — and they’re both credited with the script)
dealing with a phony “kidnapping” staged by car salesman Jerry Lundegaard
(William H. Macy) against his wife Jean (Kristin Rudrüd) to get his hands on
some of his father-in-law’s money. (There’s an interesting family resemblance
to the film version of Sorry, Wrong Number and in particular to Burt Lancaster’s role as a weakling who married
the daughter of a rich man, went to work for his father-in-law, hated it and
plotted a crime against his wife to get his hands on her family’s money.) To do
this, he hires two professional criminals, Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi) and
Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare), whom he’s met through Shep Proudfoot (Steve
Reavis), a Native American who works for Jerry’s car dealership as a mechanic,
and the first intimation that we have that this crime is going to go wretchedly
wrong due to the incompetence of the people involved is in the opening scene,
in which Jerry shows up for his meeting with the crooks at 8:30 — an hour later
than they were expecting him — since he got his signals crossed on the time.
Jerry is desperate for money for reasons he doesn’t explain but we can easily
guess at, and the film cuts effectively between his depressingly ordinary suburban
life with Jean and their son Scotty (Tony Denman), his fraught business
relationship with his father-in-law and boss Wade Gustafson (Harve Presnell in
his first film in 20 years) and Wade’s attorney, Stan Grossman (Larry
Brandenburg), and the interchange between the crooks — particularly the
garrulous Carl and the virtually taciturn Gaear (whose character reminded me of
the old radio routine in which Gary Cooper answered every question with, “Yup,”
and when asked if he was ever going to say anything but “Yup” replied, “Nope”).
About the only thing they have in common is an insatiable urge for sex; in an
early scene they hire two prostitutes and have sex with them simultaneously — I
found it revealing that in both scenes in which Carl is shown having sex, his
female partner is on top — and when they’ve finally got their rocks off the
crooks show up at Jerry’s home, kidnap Jean (she makes it easy for them by
trying to hide out in the shower, and they grab her from the curtain and pull
her out, whereupon she stumbles and falls down the stairs — an interesting
inversion of the shower-murder scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho) and make off with her.
Only a state trooper (James
Gaulke) shows up and pulls Carl over for not having dealer tags attached to his
car (an Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera Jerry provided him from his inventory) while
the tied-up Jean is still wrapped in the shower curtain in the back seat. Carl
says, “I’ll take care of this,” only he bungles it so much the cop gets more
and more suspicious, and Gaear pulls out a gun and shoots him dead, leaving the
trooper’s body in the snow and driving off alone (though Carl returns to the
action later and we don’t find out how he got back to civilization). Though the
film is called Fargo after the
town in North Dakota, virtually all of it takes place in and around Brainerd,
Minnesota, where a statue outside the town boundary proudly proclaims it “Home
of Paul Bunyan!”, and all the Scandinavian names attest to Minnesota’s status
as having the world’s largest concentration of Swedish-descended people outside
Sweden itself. (At least one of the actors, Peter Stormare as Gaear, is
genuinely Swedish and he utters the Swedish for “fucking cunt!” after he shoots
one of his victims.) Carl and Gaear kill at least three people that the cops
know about (plus one, a parking-lot attendant in Minneapolis, that they never
seem to find), and this attracts the attention of the film’s one competent
character, Brainerd police investigator Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand in
her star-making role; she’s also Mrs. Joel Coen and has been since 1984). Marge
lives a boring suburban existence with her retired husband Norm (John Carroll
Lynch), and though they seem to do nothing together but lie in bed, watch
boring television and eat, seven months previously they must have completed the sex act because Marge is visibly
pregnant. (According to imdb.com, she wore a “pregnant belly” filled with bird
seed, which was so heavy she didn’t have to act like a seven-month-old fetus in her womb was slowing
her down; the weight of the costume slowed her and made her look appropriately
sluggish on screen. The real McDormand has never been pregnant; the one son she
and Joel Coen have was a Paraguayan orphan they adopted in 1994.)
Eventually
the sheer number of bodies — including Wade Gustafson’s, who insisted on
delivering the ransom money himself instead of trusting his ditz son-in-law to
do it and got murdered for his pains after Carl saw him and said, “Who the fuck
are you?” — leads Marge to the
right direction, and she catches Gaear just after he’s killed Carl and is
trying to dispose of his body by grinding him up in a woodchipper (much the way
Laurence Harvey in Alfred Hitchcock’s TV show “Arthur” — one of the episodes
Hitchcock directed himself — kills his wife and gets rid of her body by putting
it into the grinder he uses to grind meat for the chickens he raises; he gets
away with the crime but one of Hitchcock’s droll little epilogues explains that
he got his comeuppance anyway because the chickens developed such a taste for
human flesh they ended up eating him:
I cited this show to argue that Hitchcock intended The Birds as a virtual sequel to Psycho in which actual birds take their revenge against the
human race for Norman Bates’ murder of the bird-like Marion Crane in Psycho) and he’s also apparently killed Jean, though since
she’s come near death twice before and survived (once when she fell down the
stairs in the shower curtain and once when blood dripped on her covering when
Gaear shot the trooper) we’re not all that sure if she’s alive or dead at the
end. (One wonders, if she’s dead, what’s going to happen to her hapless son
Scotty.) The film ends with the rather embarrassing arrest of Jerry Lundegaard
in bed in a T-shirt and underpants (usually the police at least would let the
poor guy put on some pants first!); case closed, and Marge can go ahead and
have her baby.
I’d been so put off by the Coen brothers’ film Barton
Fink (at least partly because I watched it
on VHS and the video box described it as a “comedy” — Charles and I watched it
together with our friend Cat and Charles wondered why I called the film a
“comedy” when he, the only one of us who’d seen it before, knew it was a
macabre tale that featured a severed head in a satchel) I’d pretty much avoided
the rest of their output, but Fargo
turned out to be a quite good film, a straightforward crime story with some
loopy aspects and a surprisingly convincing depiction of proletarian people.
Though both the Coens themselves and the actors insisted that the film was shot
totally to a written script and none
of the dialogue was improvised, the Coens wrote lines so banal and so
repetitive it sounds like the
characters are having real conversations instead of the neatly-turned exchanges
of most films. Charles noted the similarities to Hitchcock and I picked up on
how the Coens’ writing made the movie sound more like a 1970’s than a 1990’s
film, and there are some clever in-jokes throughout — including one in the
closing credits in which the actor playing one of the dead bodies is credited
with a sideways version of that weird hieroglyphic the late singer and musician
Prince briefly claimed was his new name. (This appears to be a reference to
Prince being from Minnesota, as are the Coens, which is also where the film is
set.)
They also allege in the opening credits that the film is “based on a true
story” — which it isn’t, though the Coens patched in some details from various
real-life crimes — and while watching the film I had assumed that the reference
to two brothers named Hauptmann, Norm Gunderson’s principal rivals in an
upcoming painting contest, was an in-joke because Charles Lindbergh’s baby son
was kidnapped and killed in 1932 by a man named Bruno Richard Hauptmann. It
wasn’t; according to imdb.com, there are two real painters named Hauptmann in the northern Midwest who
are friends of the Coen brothers and who, like the fictional Hauptmanns in the
film, specialize in painting ducks. I remember that Charles and I were watching
the Academy Awards the year Fargo
won two awards — to the Coen brothers for best original screenplay and Frances
McDormand for best actress in a leading role — and in his acceptance speech
Joel Coen thanked his producers “for supporting untraditional casting
decisions.” Charles said, “Just how does putting your wife in your movie count
as an ‘untraditional casting decision’?” — to which I replied, “No, the
translation is, ‘I’d like to thank my producers for letting me put my wife in my movie instead of saying, “We
need a ‘name’ actress for the role. Who the hell has ever heard of Frances
McDormand?”’” (Ironically, though she’s quite good here I’ve tended to like
McDormand better in movies her husband hasn’t directed, including Curtis Hanson’s Wonder
Boys and Lisa Cholodenko’s Laurel
Canyon.)
