Fargo — Two Uses for Nice

Minnesota nice is doing two jobs in this movie, and only one of them is nice.

Before anyone gets kidnapped, before the first body hits the snow, Fargo shows you a robbery conducted entirely in apologies. A couple has driven in to pick up their new sedan from Jerry Lundegaard, and the invoice has grown a line item: TruCoat, a rustproof sealant they said no to, clearly, more than once. The husband is livid. He knows exactly what is happening to him. And Jerry just absorbs it, nodding, sympathizing, ducking behind a boss he never actually goes to see, until the man pays the five hundred dollars anyway and drives off hating him. William H. Macy plays the whole scene in the passive voice, and it is a wonder to watch: the TruCoat has already been applied, the situation simply exists, no person did any thing. Hold onto that scene. It is the entire movie standing in a showroom. Jerry’s big plan, hiring two strangers to abduct his own wife so her rich father will pay a ransom Jerry intends to skim, is TruCoat scaled up to a family. And the person who finally stops him is the one soul in Minnesota who speaks Jerry’s polite dialect fluently and uses it as a precision instrument instead of a hiding place.

The Coens start with a lie told straight-faced: a title card swearing this is a true story, offered at the request of the survivors. It is not true, and that card is the film’s first joke about surfaces, setting you up to watch a tall tale with documentary patience. Then a whiteout, a car dragging a tan Ciera through the blur, and the scheme already rolling before you have met anyone in it. The abduction plays as slapstick that goes sour in your mouth: two men in stocking caps, a woman in a bathrobe, a shower curtain, and you are laughing right up to the second a state trooper leans into a headlight beam and Gaear ends three lives in about forty seconds. The bodies stack up like snowbanks after that. What makes the film uncanny is that the comedy and the horror never take turns. They ride in the same car, the whole way.

Everybody imitates the accent. What the Coens actually built underneath it is a study of one register with two completely different uses. In Jerry’s mouth, Minnesota nice is a wall. He cannot get one plain true sentence out, not to his wife, not to his father-in-law, not to his son, not to the two hired men he has already lost control of, and every “okay then” and “real good” is one more coat of sealant over the rot. In Marge Gunderson’s mouth, the same sounds are a tool. She does not even appear until a full half hour in, seven months pregnant, working a triple homicide at dawn, and Frances McDormand does something genuinely difficult: she lets you see the folksy warmth and the exact, patient mind running at the same time, and neither one is a costume. That “you betcha” music relaxes every person she questions until they hand her more than they meant to. This is why the film can skewer small-town life without once sneering at it. It knows the difference between a man who wears decency as camouflage and a woman for whom decency is a working operating system, and it loves her for it.

The scene that proves the design is the one that looks like it could be cut. Mike Yanagita, an old classmate, meets Marge for lunch in Minneapolis, lunges at her awkwardly, then pours out a story about marrying their friend Linda and losing her to leukemia. It is sad. Marge comforts him. And every word of it is false: no marriage, no death, just a lonely man lying fluently inside the same warm register Marge has trusted her whole life. When she finds out, you can watch the recalibration happen behind her eyes. If Mike could lie to her face in that accent, so can Jerry. She drives straight back to the dealership, reopens a conversation she had already closed, and Jerry’s composure comes apart like wet cardboard until he bolts from his own office. People have called that lunch a detour. It is the hinge of the picture: the moment nice stops counting as evidence of anything, and Marge starts listening to what is underneath it.

Roger Deakins shoots the flatlands as white paper with the horizon erased, so people register as small dark marks and the money everyone is dying over looks exactly as small as it is. Carter Burwell builds the score out of a Norwegian folk hymn, a mournful fiddle lifted by full orchestra, granting the tundra a dignity the scheme never comes close to earning. Between those poles the film runs its catalogue of desperation: Macy scraping his windshield in a fury that is really a tantrum at his entire life, Steve Buscemi’s Carl talking enough for two men while Peter Stormare’s Gaear says maybe a dozen words and does most of the killing. The wood chipper is the image the culture kept, a grotesque punchline in the snow, but the coldest joke in the film is much quieter: six people die over a debt whose exact size Jerry never once says out loud.

If the movie has a blind spot, it is Jean. The film finds room for nearly everyone’s humanity, and even Jerry earns a shred of pity, howling in his undershirt as the troopers haul him off a motel bed. But the woman being traded exists mostly as cargo. Her terror is choreographed as farce, her death happens offscreen between scenes and gets reported in half a sentence, and she is mourned as a category, never as a person. Marge’s closing speech grieves the waste; nobody in the film grieves Jean in particular. It is the one place the famous warmth does not reach, and on rewatch you can feel the reach stopping.

That speech is still the moral summit of everything the Coens have made. Marge, driving Gaear away from the chipper, glances at him in the mirror and asks, gently, the only question the movie cares about: and for what? For a little bit of money. There’s more to life than a little money, ya know. And here ya are. And it’s a beautiful day. He looks out the window. Then the film does the thing that makes it permanent. It goes home. Norm and Marge in bed, a three-cent mallard stamp welcomed into the world, two more months until the baby, and not one atom of irony in the frame. Fargo stares at the full stupidity of greed, then hands the last word to a happy marriage and a duck painting, and means every syllable. Funny, dark, and oddly humane does not begin to cover it. This is the rare crime picture that knows exactly what the crime was for, and exactly what it could never buy.