Fargo (1996): People Are Funny, and Sad

The Coen brothers buried a kidnapping-for-hire plot in the snows of Minnesota and produced the decade's most perfectly balanced tragicomedy.

Vast snow-covered Midwestern plain with a lone highway and telephone poles under an overcast sky — The film's true setting: horizontal white nothing, in every direction.

The Film

Opening with a deadpan claim of being "a true story" — a joke the Coens let the audience discover for themselves — Fargo follows a flailing car salesman who hires two criminals to kidnap his own wife, and the pregnant small-town police chief who calmly unravels the scheme. Frances McDormand's Marge Gunderson became one of American cinema's indelible characters: decent, methodical, unfailingly polite, and harder than anyone in the film. Around her, Joel and Ethan Coen composed a landscape film disguised as a crime film, all white horizons, parka silhouettes, and Carter Burwell's mournful Scandinavian-folk score.

The recognition came fast. Joel Coen took the Best Director prize at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival, and at the 1997 Academy Awards the film won Best Actress for McDormand and Best Original Screenplay for the brothers. In 2006, the Library of Congress National Film Registry selected Fargo for preservation as a culturally significant American film — the institutional confirmation of what audiences had decided a decade earlier.

The Japan Release

Japanese distributors of the era knew exactly what to do with a film like this, and the campaign was a textbook example of prestige-badge marketing: the Cannes laurel and the Oscar statuettes did the heavy lifting on every poster and chirashi. The film's Japanese promotional copy framed it with a line of almost haiku-like compression — people are funny, and sad — which captured the film's tonal tightrope better than most English-language criticism managed. The original promotional page at this address listed the film's awards like a wine label lists medals; this essay stands in its place.

The film played the art-house circuit described in our mini-theater essay and found a devoted Japanese audience among viewers who relished its particular combination of violence, civility, and snow. Its influence on the country's crime fiction and film culture proved durable — the film's mythology of buried ransom money even seeded later works of fiction and, eventually, an American anthology television series that extended the brand into the streaming age.

The Coen Question

For Japanese cinephiles, Fargo crystallized the Coen brothers as auteurs to be tracked film by film — a directorial brand as legible as any star's. Their earlier work had circulated in Japan, but this was the film that turned each subsequent Coen release into an event with a guaranteed audience, a status confirmed two years later by The Big Lebowski. The brothers' mixture of meticulous craft and moral fable mapped neatly onto an audience raised on genre cinema that took ethics seriously.

Afterlife

Fargo has only grown. Marge Gunderson regularly tops lists of the screen's great detectives; the screenplay is taught as a model of economy; and the film's vision of pleasant surfaces over desperate interiors has proven endlessly adaptable. Within this archive's decade, it stands as the moment the American independent film achieved unarguable prestige — the year the festival circuit, the Academy, and the popcorn audience all agreed on the same strange, snowbound picture. For where that prestige machinery came from, see The Foreign-Film Boom.