Fargo

So I gave Fargo another chance. And I still walked away with the same sour taste in my mouth. It's a real head scratcher, for it seems that the Coen brothers grasp the seriousness of the subject matter, but they just can't get past their tendency to caricature. With a film as outrageous as Raising Arizona, the art of caricature works in their favor: we don't need to believe these people exist, so their blank impossibility doesn’t place us in a cooly superior position to them. But with material as brutal as the Coens’ claim Fargo is built upon, caricature exhausts itself in condescension and reduces the moral and ethical issues to vacuous nonsense. When the pregnant female cop (Frances McDormand) gives her “all for a little bit of money” speech to the captured killer, it comes across as rank idiocy. Is it possible that in the presence of so much wanton brutality she could be such a simpleton? More importantly, any possibility of spectatorial identification with her judgment of the killers has been negated by the Coens’ patronizing treatment of her, her husband (another cop), and anyone else not associated with the killers. Anyone not evil or compromised in some way is depicted as a north country fool; If the Coens could have, they would have all these creatures just say “doncha knooo” for the entire film. The same skills with narrative that they have been praised for with No Country for Old Men, are in ample evidence here. The first thirty minutes -- before the caricatures take over -- is a vigorous piece of film-making.