The Banality of Virtue, page 2
"Fargo" conspicuously boasts a Sympathetic Character in the person of Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand), the police chief of Brainerd, Minnesota ("Home of Paul Bunyan"), in placid pursuit of the solution to her first homicide case. The culprits include Jerry Lundegaard (the always marvelous William H. Macy), a car salesman in desperate, if unspecified, financial trouble and the two hoods (Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare) he hires to kidnap his wife in an attempt to extort money from his tyrannical father-in-law.
From this basic good vs. evil story the Coens have subtracted all the glamour and grit usually attendant on crime dramas. No one says anything clever, or dresses well. There's very little sex, and what there is of it is unsexy. There is only one chase scene, and that unsuspenseful. The detective, a very nice pregnant lady, punches nobody, and suffers no cynical, tormented loneliness as the result of her work (in fact, she has a very nice husband who paints wildlife pictures for stamps). The villains consist of a fool and a sullen lout. No colorful, underworld characters, or sinister, rain-slicked urban alleys.
To the extent that the joke is on us, the audience, and the decadent taste we've acquired for flashy violence, it works; point taken. But much of the movie's humor springs from the dullness of the Midwestern characters and their world. Marge conducts her investigations in bland, perky small-talk that occasionally rises to school-principal sternness when she's addressing miscreants. These people dine on fast food or fricassee at all-you-can-eat buffets furnished with colonial-style chairs, and consider a Jose Feliciano concert a big night out. They say "Love ya, hon" and "Thanks a bunch" and "You're darn tootin'."
The danger in portraying characters you consider significantly less interesting than yourself is that too much superiority and not enough affection can lead to a fatal snottiness. Since affection has never been the Coen's strong suit, in much of "Fargo" they're skating on thin ice and they sometimes wind up on the wrong side of it. Furthermore, the brothers have got another joke in play, the juxtaposition of the Scandinavian strain in Midwestern culture (the word "ya" litters the screenplay) and the Bergman-esque notes they strike. See, these people are kinda Swedish, but unlike Bergman characters, they're not reflective or deep, in fact, quite the opposite. Get it?
But the specter of Ingmar, once conjured, may be more than the Coens bargained for. Certainly, the Swede could be oppressively arty and exhibited an often tiresome lack of humor. Nevertheless, he did tackle the Big Questions (meaning of life, etc.) that continue to preoccupy human beings, despite the advent of smarty-pants filmmaking. Reminding us of him (for who among us ponders the mysteries of "Persona" anymore?) is good for a few laughs, but mostly it calls attention to all the serious themes that the Coens flinch from. It makes us expect things from an otherwise merely amusing movie that the Coens aren't inclined to deliver.
For example, "Fargo" contains some scenes of horrific violence, which feel all the more sickening against the mundane hyper-realism of the film's setting. This, clearly is evil, but what, exactly, is its source? Jerry Lundegaard's bonehead scheme sets it in motion, but Jerry, however desperate, would never intentionally resort to bloodshed. The first killing happens as a result of a dumb mistake, and the rest follow it in a chain of queasy inevitability, each crime making the next one inevitable.
All but one. The one murder that's gratuitous, and all the more piteous for that, happens off-screen. The character who commits it, and who sets the string of deaths in motion to begin with, played by Stormare (himself a veteran of Bergman's films and plays), remains a cipher psychologically. In the Coens' drama of good vs. evil, good, in the person of Marge Gunderson may be banal, but evil is. . . what? We aren't permitted to see; that character's inner life is closed to us, and to everyone else. When the two finally confront each other, Marge can only say, bewildered, "There's more to life than a little bit of money, you know. Don't ya know that? I just don't understand it."
In the universe of "Fargo," where virtue is a kind of ignorance and wickedness a nullity, where do real people fit in? Bergman, for all his frequent dreariness, had the courage to implicate himself -- and us with him -- in his examinations of selfish artists, unloving parents, faithless friends and doubting clerics. With the Coens, we float safely above the elemental fray, entertained but not terribly challenged. And even that wouldn't be so disappointing if they hadn't brought up Bergman to begin with, and with him the possibility of being deeply moved by a film. It's the least we can expect in exchange for looking at all that snow.
