Fargo (1996)

“Rotates its story through satire, comedy, suspense and violence, until it emerges as one of the best films I’ve ever seen…To watch it is to experience steadily mounting delight, as you realize the filmmakers have taken enormous risks, gotten away with them and made a movie that is completely original, and as familiar as an old shoe.” — Roger Ebert

SYNOPSIS

Joel and Ethan Coen consolidated their standing among the major American filmmakers of their generation with Fargo, a blackly comic crime caper that juxtaposes folksy regionalism, gruesome violence, and an unexpectedly affecting vein of human warmth. William H. Macy stars as Jerry Lundegaard, a desperate Minneapolis car salesman whose spectacularly ill-conceived scheme to have his wife kidnapped sets off a chain of increasingly bloody consequences across the frozen Minnesota landscape. Enter Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand), the heavily pregnant, unfailingly polite police chief whose cheerful disposition conceals a formidable intelligence and whose investigation brings her face-to-face with acts of almost incomprehensible cruelty. The Coens mine the collision between banal Midwestern routines and sudden brutality for both mordant comedy and mounting suspense, while Roger Deakins’s stark compositions turn snowbound highways and empty fields into images of eerie beauty. Anchored by McDormand’s Academy Award-winning performance, Fargo balances its gallery of desperate criminals, botched schemes, and grisly violence with a disarming tenderness toward the ordinary lives unfolding around them.