It took an ice storm for me to realize how much I really wanted to watch this movie. I left my copy of it over at my girlfriends (ex now) house about a year ago, and I haven't missed it very much until right about now. So I figured I would write about it.
Before the Coens released No Country for Old Men (which I'm planning on seeing this weekend for a third time, and have already pre-ordered the DVD), Fargo was by far my favorite Coen Bros film. I first saw it when I was 13, and I was astounded by the cinematography and the hauntingly minimalist view of small-town crime that it presented. Frances McDormand is still my favorite pregnant woman ever on screen (about 900 times better than Ellen Page and Katharine Heigl put together). Her portrayal of the cop at the center of the horrific events is one of the greatest I've ever seen, but I'll get to that later.
The film begins with what I think is one of the most brilliant and ironic things I've ever seen; the Coens claim that the events of their sick thriller are completely true, and out of respect for the dead, the events have not been changed at all. An unaware viewer would watch the movie thinking that the sick events portrayed really occured, and that Coens found the story hilarious. That is by far the best joke of the movie, in true Coen Bros fashion.
William H. Macy's car salesman is introduced as a despicable, strange man. However, you continue to have mixed feelings about him all the way until the end of the film when he is ultimately responsible for the death of almost all of the chief characters. He is alone, desperate, pathetic, and tragically familiar all the way through. The way that the film manipulates your feelings towards the man is near perfection. And the fact that the Coens can characterize a man by making him clean ice off his windshield is nothing short of GODLY. (lol)
Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare are, in a sick, twisted way, their own little buddy-comedy. Their exchanges in the car rival those of John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction, which really is saying a lot. Their duo of two would-be hit-men/kidnappers is one of my favorite parts of the film, and you almost begin to feel sorry for Peter Stormare as you see him slipping even further into insanity in that isolated log cabin. And Steve Buscemi, as always, is just a fricken psycho.
And now we get to Frances McDormand, my favorite pregnant cop. As she tries to sort through the events laying out before her, you witness her growth from a happy-go-lucky small town cop into a hardened investigator, weary from the new things that she's seen in the world. From her obsessive high-school friend that she encounters, from her interrogation of two college hookers, and all the way to her run-in with a man in a woodchipper, she is changed. In the opening seen her face seems almost youthful and in love with life, and by the end, her face appears to be more lined, and her eyes more weary. Her realization of the atrocities of the world are very similar to Tommy Lee Jones' sheriff in No Country for Old Men, and in watching them both you will notice many similarites in the themes presented (even though Fargo does it in a more comedic sort of way).
Being a huge fan of the Coens, my review of this movie might be a little biased, but I mean, this is a blog. And die-hard fans of the Coens might debate this by saying that they were at the top of their game before this movie, back with movies like Blood Simple and Miller's Crossing. While those are great movies, I think Fargo is when the Coens really came into their own. It managed to make an impact on popular culture, but in an extremely distinct way that only the Coens could achieve. Fargo is still in my top 10 favorite movies ever made, and for sentimental reasons, I don't think that'll ever change.