What makes fargo so good

I recommend watching Fargo and I got curious about the relatively new television show now too. Maybe I will watch it at some point. Talking about this movie finally again, I want to emphasize once again how much fun it is to watch the characters here with all their quirks and actions. Extremely memorable. Go check it out. Prismark10 3 February Fargo is a curious wacky but dark crime thriller. The Coen Brothers build on their previous noir crime movies and play around with the conventions.

They do this by imbuing it with some bizarro characters. Jerry Lundegaard William H Macy is an executive car dealer with a rich father in law. He enlists two wacko hoods. Jerry hopes to split the ransom money with the hoods but the plan goes awry. Carl and Gaear leave a trail of bodies behind.

The victims includes a state trooper. There is little by way of background to the characters. Jerry seems to be running some kind of car scam, he is in debt and has a business investment where he wants his father in law to lend him some money. It is clear that nervy Jerry is way over his head with his mad bad plan. The snowy landscapes of Minneapolis, the mock Scandinavian accents all give the movie some distinction.

Despite some humour which mainly comes from a cool kooky Marge. This is a misanthropic film. The dead bodies pile up and the killings become nastier as the movie goes on. It was an accomplished movie from the Coens who were still regarded as Independent filmmakers. It is just that Fargo is a difficult film to like. Only the initial deal takes place in Fargo. Most of the film is either in Brainard, Minneapolis or the surrounding areas.

It's basically the story of a crime gone wrong, the kidnapping of William H. Macy's wife, arranged by Macy to pay back money owed on a business deal gone wrong, and impacting so many people. The two kidnappers are stupid yet brutal, one Steve Buscemi a hot tempered loud mouth, the other Peter Stormare quiet but completely deranged.

Macy's father-in-law Harve Presnell is one nasty old man, taking matters into his own hands which results in more violence. Hiding ransom money in the Minnesota snow, Buscemi obviously doesn't think of how he'll identify where it is when the snow melts. After all the St. Olaf jokes on "Golden Girls", Minnesota gets another scorching, not just through the humorous accents but the way these people think. Certainly, McDormand's Marge Gunderson is the smartest cookie in the box of oreos here, and the idiocy of the three villains isn't hidden by their obnoxiousness or their obvious lying.

There are very funny moments here that don't hide the fact that this is a grotesque story where even the minor characters a Native American who set Macy up with the kidnappers, a Japanese man who went to school with Marge, and several hookers seem to be barely human with their shortage of brain cells.

It's definitely a crime doesn't pay story told with a wry view point, tongue in cheek and leg in wood chipper. You can't help but laugh even when you're completely disgusted with what's going on onscreen. A solid story is supported by a weird and wonderful array of characters and some sharp writing bob the moo 18 April Jerry Lundegaard is a car dealer who has money problems. Unable to ask his wealthy father-in-law for money, Jerry employs two criminal types to kidnap his wife and then split the ransom with Jerry.

However when a cop pulls over the two criminals, a triple shooting is the result and the police get involved. With Jerry getting pressure from the kidnappers now that thing has gone sour and Officer Marge Gunderson making progress in her investigation, things are far from as straightforward as was originally planned.

The film opens with a bleak, snowy scene with a great sweeping score and pretty much sets the tone for a film that feels bigger than it actually is. The opening scene between Jerry and his two contracted hoods is really good and is typical of the comic tone that runs all the way through the film. Setting the film in a part of American with Scandinavian roots was clever as it gives the characters funny accents before you even worry about what they are going to say with them!

The screenplay won an Oscar and it deserved it simply for the dialogue and the characters it creates. It is a dark film but it is one that fans of the Coen brothers' universe will find funny. Of course it helps no end to have a great cast to deliver it. McDormand won the Oscar despite only being one of several good performances in the film. Her Marge is funny yet relentless in her pursuit.

Macy is as reliable as ever and it is his increasingly frantic performance that is the best of the film for my money - weedy, pathetic and hopelessly out of his depth but funny with it. Buscemi and Stormare are both very good for very different reasons and the rest of the support cast is comprised of many strange characters who are funny. Only the very occasional bit hits a sour note, but this is very occasional and doesn't hurt the film one little bit.

Overall this may not be a true story but that is not to say that it isn't fascinating anyway - who says truth is better than fiction?! The roundly great performances do great work with a deserved Oscar winner of a screen play that fills a solid crime storyline with all manner of characters that produce a gripping and funny film that is one of the best and most accessible of the Coen brother films.

It's funny how the simple word "Yaaah" sounds so dimwitted in the movie, yet turns out to be one of the few affirmations of normalcy in a maelstrom of frenzied lunacy.

What happens to them is a sort of poetic justice, but there's nothing as lyrical or pretty as poetry going on here.

Here's a movie where you can't picture any of the principals being portrayed by anyone else. It's the perfect meld of characters, dialog and situations that domino from one disaster to another with eerie precision, and the unsettling feeling that yes indeed, as nuts as it all is, this is something that could actually happen.

For whatever reason, I haven't seen a lot of the Coen Brothers pictures. I came across "The Big Lebowski" a couple of weeks ago, and decided to catch this film today to keep the streak going. I'm suitably impressed by their quirky characters and bizarre, colorful plots to keep on going.

Bitingly original, they leave one somewhat disturbed, but curious for more. Frances McDormand, William H. Macy and Steve Buscemi are stand out in their roles here, but except for a few brief minutes shared by Macy with each of them, their characters never really appear together.

Chalk it up again to the story tellers who move things along in spite of the hapless Jerry Lundegaard, someone we can all relate to whenever things we can clearly see in our head just don't quite turn out the way they're planned. Poor Jerry, he never even came close; kind of makes you wonder how he ever became the executive sales manager.

Jerry Lundegaard's inept crime falls apart due to his and his henchmen's bungling and the persistent police work of the quite pregnant Marge Gunderson Frances McDormand.

The Coen Brothers have consistently created good content for thirty years, with almost everything they touch being golden or at worst silver. Somehow along the way, "Fargo" got to be the film most associated with them even overshadowing the cult hit "Big Lebowski". Nothing wrong with that. This is clearly the film that got people to notice Frances McDormand if they had not already done so, and probably lead to much bigger things for Peter Stormare one of the greatest character actors in the business today.

After watching "Fargo", you may feel as though you've just been chopped up like The plot has down-on-his-luck salesman Jerry Lundegaard William H. Unfortunately, the whole thing goes completely haywire. This is a bloody movie unlike anything that you expect. Pulling no punches, they make you feel like there's a knife in your brain. But I mean that in a good way. I think that we can all agree that no one can do it like the Coen brothers.

To say it like the people in the movie would say it: "So this was a good movie? So they kidnap the wife, but on the journey to the secluded cabin they will be keeping her in they are stopped by a policeman who Gaear kills, he also kills two witnesses who crash their car. Jerry, who did originally ask for money from Wade, which he thought he was going to get not needing the kidnappers anymore but didn't, gets the ball rolling for the kidnappers ransom money.

Marge's investigation leads her to the discovery that the car passing by and killing the victims was hired at the car lot that Jerry works in for Wade, he is obviously very nervous in convincing her he knows nothing about it.

It comes to the money drop-off for the ransom, and Wade goes against the wishes of the kidnappers to take it himself, while Gaear keeps an eye on Jean Carl is the one to pickup. Angered by the appearance of the father-in-law and not Jerry he shoots Wade, and he ends up getting shot in the face, and after Carl leaves the parking lot, Jerry is the one to take the body of Wade away.

Gaear kills Carl with an axe after an argument for the car, and after questioning Jerry again and seeing him flee, Marge finds her way to the cabin where the remaining criminal is putting the body parts of his dead partner in a wood chipper.

In the end Gaear is arrested for the five murders, Jerry is caught and arrested for his involvement, and Marge returns home to husband Norm Volcano's John Carroll Lynch and they both look forward to the two months left to wait for their baby. McDormand gives a nice simple performance that I can see being worthy of the accolade she received, Macy is great as the man setting up the kidnap, and Buscemi and Stormare are equally great as the hopeless but creepy criminals.

The stylistic direction by the Coen brothers are brilliant, their scripting is witty, funny and full of some really good thrills, the snowy settings are worth watching, and you can enjoy both the tension and the moments that make you laugh, a fantastic black comedy thriller.

Very good! I didn't see this in the theater but saw it the first week it was out for rental, and have enjoyed it ever since. In fact, I probably enjoy this more each time I view it.

It's a sick movie, though, make no mistake about that. However, it holds a strange fascination, probably because of the odd characters.

About the story: first, it is NOT a true story as indicated in the movie. That's a lie. With a budget of 25 million dollars, it was a serious blow when the box office outcome gave them back only a tenth of the invested funds. This was a delicate time for the filmmaking brothers, as they had reached a specific point in their career where the next project would most likely be the deciding one.

But Fargo , the humorous dark comedy we have all gotten to love in the years since, turned out to be a huge commercial and critical success, opening the doors of mainstream America for the two brothers whose unique authorial voice had been perceived too unapproachable for the average film lover. Gunderson, the police officer who tries to decipher the monstrous events unfolding around her, is the emotional and moral center of the story, the anchor in the overwhelming storm of wrongdoings that engulfs the small town unused to big-city-corruption and abomination.

What should also be noted is that Fargo is a typical Coen film in both the thematical and stylistic aspects, and as such served as the stepping stone of the general audience in their entry into the world of one of the most distinguishable filmmaking forces of contemporary cinema.

Macy, Peter Stormare and Harve Presnell. A big commercial hit in the United States, Fargo experienced almost uniformly enthusiastic response from the critics when it came out in March How much it resonated within the film-appreciating community can be also seen in the fact it was selected for preservation in the US National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as early as in A monumentally important screenplay.

NOTE: For educational and research purposes only. Absolutely our highest recommendation. Reload document Open in new tab In the interview which follows, initially published in , Joel and Ethan Coen discuss the writing and filming of Fargo , its precise characterizations, acting performances and the visual style that emphasizes the spiritual landscape of the bleak Midwestern setting.

William Rodney Allen. University Press of Mississippi, Did some news item inspire Fargo , as the press kit suggests, or is that another false trail that you two have laid? We were not interested in making a documentary film, and we did no research about the nature of the murders or the events connected to them. But in warning viewers that we had found our inspiration from a real story, we were preparing them to not view the film like an ordinary thriller.

Did this kidnapping of a wife organized by her husband create a good deal of sensation in ? In fact, its surprising how many things of this land get very little publicity. We heard about it from a friend who lived very close to where the story unfolded in Minnesota, which also happens to be where we are from. Why did you call the film Fargo when the important action of the film is set in Brainerd, which is in Minnesota, and not Fargo?

Here you returned somewhat to the territory of your first films, Blood Simple and Raising Arizona. JC: There are some similarities, but also some important differences. These three films are all small-scale productions, their main themes relate to criminality, to kidnapping, and they are also very specific in their reference to geographical locale. But we have always thought that Blood Simple belongs to the tradition of flamboyant melodrama, as given expression in the novels of James M.

Cain, along with some influence from the horror film. In Fargo , we tried out a very different stylistic approach, introducing the subject in a quite dry fashion. Our intention was also that the camera should tell the story like an observer. The structure of the film also follows from the origin of the story in an actual event: we allowed ourselves more digressions and detours.

Each incident did not necessarily have to be connected to the plot. We also allowed ourselves to withhold the appearance of the heroine, Marge Gunderson, until the middle of the film. EC: This is also a way of signifying to the viewer that he was not watching a genre film, that we were not going to satisfy expectations of this kind. In this way too, the film differs from Blood Simple. What is it that drew you to the subject?

JC: There were two or three things about the actual events that interested us. In the first place, the story takes place in a time and place with which we were familiar and could explore.

And then again it features a kidnapping, a subject that has always fascinated us. In fact, we had a screenplay that was quite different from Fargo that we would have been very happy to shoot. Finally, this subject offered us the chance to shoot a crime film with characters quite different from genre stereotypes. When we begin writing, we need to imagine in a quite specific way the world where the story unfolds.

The difference is that until this point these universes were purely fictional, while in the case of Fargo there was an air of authenticity we had to communicate. Since we come from the area, that helped us take into account the particular character of the place. Is that a gag? EC: No, not at all. Most of the actors come from this part of the country, and they did not need coaching, but Frances McDormand, Bill Macy, and Harve Presnell had to have some training so their accents would blend with the others.

This was partly how the characters were developed, and it also contributed to the air of authenticity. JC: The people there speak is a very economical fashion, which is almost monosyllabic. This seems as exotic to other Americans as it does to you Europeans! In fact, the Scandinavian influence on the culture of that area, the rhythm of the sentences, the accent, all of this is not familiar at all to the rest of America.

The story could have just as well taken place on the moon! EC: When we were small, we were not really conscious of this Scandinavian heritage that so strongly affects this part of the country simply because we had no points for comparison. Certainly, all the exoticism comes from this Nordic character, with its polite and reserved manner. One of the sources of comedy in the story comes from the opposition between this constant avoidance of all confrontation and the murders gradually piling up.

Our parents had always lived in this part of the country, and that means we returned there regularly and were familiar with the culture. Because we had not lived there for some time, we had the feeling of being separated in part from the environment where we had grown up. The episode between Marge and her old high-school friend is a digression from the central narrative, which is fairly compressed. EC: Someone mentioned to us that in this scene, Frances acts in the very restrained manner of an Oriental, while her Japanese friend is talkative and irrational in the American style.

It was certainly our intention while writing this sequence that it should be a digression. This is also what happens in the scenes with her husband. EC: Our intention was to demonstrate that this story is more closely connected to real life than to fiction, and we felt free to create a scene that had no links to the plot. The Hudsucker Proxy is no doubt your most stylized film. This one, in contrast, is probably your least.

JC: We wanted to take a new approach to style in this film, to make something radically different from our previous films. But curiously, working from actual events, we came to yet another form of stylization, in the largest sense of that term. The end result was then not as different as we imagined it would be! A little like Kubrick did with Dr.

Strangelove , you begin with a somewhat documentary presentation, then little by little, with icy humor, everything comes unglued and turns in the direction of the absurd. Hated it, actually. But the reason I love that review is because I like to imagine the Coens reading it and smirking ever so slightly, smirking because even all these years later — Duke took to Amazon in — they were still fooling people.

Smirking because indignant responses like this, perhaps even more than the praise and plaudits, were, I think, exactly what they were hoping to achieve. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed.

As earlier stated, Fargo initially tries to pass itself off as a true story. The basic plot of the film concerns car dealership salesman Jerry Lundegaard a superb, Oscar-nominated William H. Macy , a desperate little man who knows that he can make a killing so to speak by investing in a parking lot venture no kidding if he just had the money. Anyone with any sense could see that this is not a good idea.

Unfortunately, the salesman has left good sense far behind and, in fact, is planning to chisel the pair out of as much of their share of the ransom money as he possibly can. From the start, something seems a bit out of whack about the characters, the setting, and the route that the crime and its aftermath proceed to take.

In the outline, the expected takes place, but in the details, nothing is as usual. This is a mark of any distinctive filmmaker and the films of the brothers definitely feature a universe specific to their work.

However, the Coens use these very traits for an abundance of humor. The story takes place in middle of what looks to be one bleak winter. This is more than just a detail of the setting, though. The world of this film seems to be quite reined in by this harsh climate. In fact, almost all of the characters seem to have at least part of their wits frozen or at least thickened by the cold. No one in this world is going to win any award for being hip or stylish.

In fact, just the act of making it through in this rough place appears to have caused many to just settle for being comfortable and cozy, to hell with how it looks or comes across.