30 Years Later, The Noir That Made The Coens’ Reputation Is Still Chilling

Ethan Coen’s latest solo film, Honey Don’t, could generously be described as “slight,” and less-generously described as “bad.” While he dabbles in capers so light they risk floating away, brother Joel’s only solo effort to date is 2021’s The Tragedy of Macbeth, which is well-regarded but so self-serious that you suspect Shakespeare himself might have suggested dialing things back a notch. Naturally, these efforts have raised questions about what sensibilities each brother brought to their many collaborative efforts, including the reputation-making Fargo, which hit theaters 30 years ago today.

Fargo was the Coens’ sixth film, and easily their most successful yet, winning two Academy Awards and doubling the box office results of Raising Arizona, the only other notable financial success they’d had by 1996. Having since spawned six seasons of television, and still standing as one of their better-known and more easily-accessible movies, rewatching Fargo feels like you’re getting a glimpse at how the final ingredients were added to their secret sauce.

The curmudgeonly National Review opined that Fargo “could have been a nice little film noir if they hadn't compounded it with black comedy, absurdism, and folksy farce,” but those additions were the point. Fargo feels like Blood Simple, the Coens’ neo-noir debut, got fed through the genre, well, woodchipper, producing a pitch-black comedy about the emptiness of greed. It’s messing with you from the moment it opens with a blatant lie about being a true story, with Joel Coen later saying, “If an audience believes that something’s based on a real event, it gives you permission to do things they may otherwise not accept.”

That quasi-believability starts with William H. Macy’s Jerry Lundegaard, a milquetoast car salesman with a cockamamie scheme to clear his debts by kidnapping his own wife and sending the ransom bill to his wealthy father-in-law. Lundegaard stands tall, albeit only figuratively, in the pantheon of Hollywood’s greatest wimps, as a sniveling pushover constantly surprised by the bloody chaos his scheming inadvertently unleashes.

That he’s a pathetically small-scale character makes him perfect for such a stripped-down film, where understated shots of snowy highways and barren forests stand in stark contrast to the bombastic flop that was the Coens’ prior film, The Hudsucker Proxy. It takes quite some time for Frances McDormand’s heroine cop, Marge Gunderson, to even be introduced, and her low-key, shoe-leather-focused investigation is punctuated by scenes of domestic quietude. It’s not exactly the drunken divorcee detective versus cold-blooded career criminal that so many noirs give us.

The body count, however, is what you’d expect, if not more so. Gunderson calmly and politely investigating so much bloodshed feels like a first draft of Tommy Lee Jones navigating the wake of Anton Chigurh’s rampage in No Country For Old Men, although she maintains a sense of relative optimism that Jones’ sheriff never manages. Gunderson encounters a variety of strange characters — that’s usually half the appeal of a Coen movie — but it’s only when she’s hauling in Peter Stormare’s laconic thug that she finally passes any judgment, castigating him for murdering over mere money, and on such a beautiful day to boot.

That makes Fargo both relentlessly bleak and yet strangely upbeat, with Gunderson’s tranquil home life providing literal and figurative shelter from the storm. Innocent bystanders face tough odds in movies like this, but it’s still possible to go through life without getting dragged down by other people’s cruel nonsense. Not to pick on one dud too much, but maybe this is why Fargo works while Honey Don’t felt like Ethan Coen left the premise for a perfectly fine neo-noir out to melt in the California sun. No matter how much wackiness you throw in — and Fargo has plenty of it — it still helps if your movie is about something.

Perhaps fittingly, a film that opens with a BS claim about its own realism spawned a BS legend about a Japanese woman dying of exposure while searching for the money Steve Buscemi hides before he drives off to meet a grisly fate. In reality, the lovelorn and depressed Takako Konishi went to America to commit suicide, but the phony story spawned 2014’s Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, about a solitary Japanese office woman who becomes obsessed with Fargo and strikes out in search of Buscemi’s treasure. A sad, dreamy story where Kumiko seems well-aware that Fargo is fictional yet completely convinced that the treasure will materialize for her anyway, its mimicry of Fargo’s true story disclaimer makes it a strange coda about how movies worm their way into our cultures and our lives.

Fargo has certainly managed that, whether it’s the film’s darker moments sticking in viewers’ memories or the mere mention of its title drawing to mind exaggerated Minnesotan accents offering insights like, “You’re darn tootin!” As for the Coens, they would follow Fargo with a long string of mostly hits that mostly managed to balance their memorable characterization with their more cartoonish instincts. Not to argue that the two need to forever be joined at the hip, but three decades later, Fargo remains the purest example of their individual approaches apparently bouncing off each other in all the right ways.

Fargo is streaming on Netflix.