Updated: 5 July 1997

FARGO

Two stars. But with a caveat.

This is an obviously well-made film. The shots and the story are handled expertly. At times, the camera tells the story, as it does in the hands of true film-makers. The actors are also handled very well. Very distinctive performances by each made for a very nice piece of ensemble work. In other words, a very good job of directing, and expert acting all the way around, in roles that are a heck of a lot harder than they appear.

So those two stars are purely for technical merit. Only.

Because, try as I might, I cannot fathom one reason that a person ought to see this film. It is degrading. It is desensitized and desensitizing. I was looking forward to a film that had been made by the same team that produced THE HUDSUCKER PROXY--a marvelous and uplifting movie. This is not only NOT the film I was hoping for, it just about made me believe that the brothers Coen had been abducted and replaced with evil twins.

I think this movie is cruel. Satire can present us with material that we are expected to know is sometimes cruel, sometimes just ridiculous. Its purpose is to point these things out with humor. So we laugh at and with satire. Sometimes, as Abe Lincoln pointed out, we even laugh at tragedy, because there is much that is laughable in the cosmic scheme of things. But that is too broad a concept for this movie. This film assumes that the cruelty is funny. In and of itself

It takes a specific scenario--say, the hired abduction of a man's wife--and turns it into...into what? The construct of the scene is partly comedy, and partly horror. People were laughing in the theater, but the actress was playing a purely terrified woman. She turns in horror and gets caught in the shower curtain, entangling herself to the degree that when she reaches the stairs, she ends up falling down them and collapsing in an unconscious heap. People were roaring. It's as if a mass murderer gunned down the keystone cops. They all get shot and fall in a nice little heap of their own accord--which might be funny if they weren't dead.

I'm sure that I've got some hangup or other that is preventing me from enjoying this scene the way others do. I must have. Because I didn't see it satirizing anything. I did see malevolence made light. Shouldn't the audiences sympathies lie with the innocent victim? Shouldn't there be some inherent grievance against those that have broken into her home, and, moreover, have already been established as thoroughly bad guys?

One of them is greasy and repulsive, the other is simply deadly quiet and foreboding. Despite the inane and one-sided banter carried on by the greaseball, they are not turned into anything the audience roots for. I thought the creators of the film might be going for the PULP FICTION type of humanizing transformation, but all their conversation does is reinforce the already-set stereotypes.

So when these goons break into the lady's house and scare the wits out of her--literally--why isn't the audiences' sympathy with her? I have to admit, I'm stumped.

But the whole movie reeks of this type of brutal disgust with ordinary people. It is a movie praised for its "honesty," and I have to admit it appears that it is. But appearances...

The ordinary people [non-killer types] are made so plain that they're hard to discern from the snow that nearly blankets the movie. Only the scumbags have any nooks and crannies their characters that give them dimension.

That's not entirely true. The hero--a pregnant policewoman played very well as usual by Frances McDormand--has some nooks and crannies, but it's hard to say exactly why they're there. An entire sub-storyline has her meeting an old high school friend who wants to seduce her. I never really understood what purpose this whole idea served. And the audience is never really given to understand whether the lunch meeting between the two ever coalesced into anything more.

So it is with real people, I suppose. We're not given to know very much at all. So we're back to the issue of this film so deftly portraying events as they "really are." When someone is shot, they don't necessarily die. Perhaps just half of their face is blown off. The events in this movie may very well lie a lot closer to the truth about some members of our society. But the lives of those people are not good material for a comedy--or any other form of entertainment. Which seems to be how this movie was received.

And when FARGO does drift into flights of gruesome imagination, it does so with its characteristic meanness: a wood-chipper.

All in all, this is a movie to avoid if you're into preserving your humanity. Heck, even for those already completely desensitized, I can't think of a good reason to see this movie. It might give them ideas.