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Leave it to the wildly inventive Coen brothers (Joel directs, Ethan produces, they both write) to concoct a fiendishly clever kidnap caper that's simultaneously a comedy of errors, a Midwestern satire, a taut suspense thriller, and a violent tale of criminal misfortune. It all begins when a hapless car salesman (played to perfection by William H. Macy) ineptly orchestrates the kidnapping of his own wife. The plan goes horribly awry in the hands of bumbling bad guys Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare (one of them being described by a local girl as "kinda funny lookin'" and "not circumcised"), and the pregnant sheriff of Brainerd, Minnesota, (played exquisitely by Frances McDormand in an Oscar-winning role) is suddenly faced with a case of multiple murders. Her investigation is laced with offbeat observations about life in the rural hinterland of Minnesota and North Dakota, and
Fargo embraces its local yokels with affectionate humor. At times shocking and hilarious,
Fargo is utterly unique and distinctly American, bearing the unmistakable stamp of its inspired creators.
--Jeff Shannon
From The New Yorker
Joel and Ethan Coen's coldest movie if not their coolest: it opens with a whiteout that slowly resolves itself into a desolate Minnesota snowscape. Everybody talks with painful slowness, as if the icy air were freezing their chops; the resulting mood is lugubrious and oddly winning. The story, about a hopeless businessman (William H. Macy) who hires a couple of crooks (Peter Stormare and Steve Buscemi) to kidnap his wife, offers the usual Coen compound of random daftness and concentrated violence. Frances McDormand has a high old time as the police chief of the town of Brainerd; she enters the plot late and, decent and unhurried (her character is seven months pregnant), plods steadily toward a solution. A few scenes go around in circles, as if snow-blind, and the humor may be too inward and contorted for some tastes. But McDormand brings order to the weirdness and warms it up. -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006
The New Yorker