The Coen brothers' breakthrough. A Minnesota kidnapping that becomes a quiet study of moral competence.
Minneapolis car salesman Jerry Lundegaard, in financial trouble he has hidden from his wealthy father-in-law, hires two small-time criminals to kidnap his wife. The plan is to extract a ransom from his father-in-law, of which Jerry will keep most. The kidnapping goes wrong almost immediately — a state trooper is shot, then two witnesses, then several more people across the next two days.
Brainerd police chief Marge Gunderson, seven months pregnant, takes the case. She works it competently, methodically, and without drama, in the Minnesotan accent the Coens have made famous. By the film's end, three of the bodies have been deposited in the back yard of a remote cabin and one of the kidnappers is feeding the other through a wood chipper. Marge handles the arrest.
Fargo opens with the title card: 'THIS IS A TRUE STORY. The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.'
Almost none of the film is true. The Coens included the title card as a structural joke — the audience would believe what they were told, and the belief would change how the events on screen registered. They have confirmed in subsequent interviews that the title card is a fiction. The film's defenders argue this is itself a kind of moral seriousness: the film is asking the audience to consider how easily they accept any documentary frame.
Frances McDormand won Best Actress for Marge Gunderson. The performance is unusual: Marge is genuinely competent, genuinely warm, genuinely unimpressed by the dramatic violence around her. She is the only major character in the film who is not driven by greed, panic, or appetite. The Coens have, across their career, made many films in which competent ordinary people are punished by chance; Fargo is the rare Coen film in which competent ordinary people are simply the moral centre.
The famous scene of Marge having lunch with her old high-school friend Mike Yanagita, who lies to her about his recent life, is the film's quietest emotional pivot. Marge is briefly destabilised — her trust in her own reading of people is shaken. The scene resolves with her realising Mike has lied to her, which gives her confidence to interrogate Jerry Lundegaard's evasions. The structural work the scene does is enormous; the screenwriting is invisible.
Fargo is the Coens' most fully realised regional film. The Minnesota accents — the long round vowels, the 'you betcha', the 'yah' — are not exaggerations. The Coens grew up in St. Louis Park, Minnesota; Frances McDormand learned the accent from recordings of Joel's mother. The accents are doing structural work: the politeness they enforce is the cultural surface that the film's violence keeps puncturing.
Roger Deakins shot the film almost entirely in white — snow, white sky, white car interiors. Sound dropouts are part of the cinematography. The film's exterior scenes are often almost silent except for footsteps in snow. The contrast with the violence — three murders inside the first thirty minutes — is the film's tonal signature.