![\"\"](\"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/08\/fargo2.jpg\" "\\"fargo2\\"")
<\/a><\/p>\nAlex takes a look at Fargo, the way the Coen Brothers are perceived,\u00a0why we must all be in love with Jennifer Lawrence, murderous drummers, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Willow Rosenberg.<\/em><\/p>\n I often find myself assuming that Joel and Ethan Coen, collectively and popularly known as the Coen Brothers, release a new film seemingly every year. This is patently false. Every time I see a tweet excitedly anticipating Inside Llewyn Davis, I think to myself, \u201cCalm down guy, the Coen\u2019s just<\/em> put out a movie.\u201d Again, false. Steven Soderbergh they are not. Looking over the Coen\u2019s IMDb pages<\/a>, you will find a much shorter list than I would apparently expect. As a team, they have together co-written and directed fifteen full-length features in the span of almost thirty years, which is a fairly standard amount of work for successful filmmakers to release in that period of time. Wes Anderson won\u2019t have made fifteen films by the time his career hits that point; CoeBro superfan Michael Bay will likely have released a handful more. But for some reason, the Coen Brothers have remained ever-present in my mind, even though they\u2019re actually far less present in reality than I thought.<\/p>\n Despite this lack of knowledge on the timeline of their career, I am definitely a Coen Brothers fan. They made Barton Fink, a film that is better than pretty much any other director\u2019s most focused work, and it is somehow only the third best film they\u2019ve made. Even the Coens’ worst films have some form of weird merit that makes them memorable; The Ladykillers remains the only film that has ever caused somebody to threaten my life for simply mentioning its existence. I doubt I go a week without thinking about Joel and\/or Ethan in some capacity, despite the fact that I (until very recently) hadn\u2019t realized they\u2019re probably even better at their profession than I already thought. Which was all a part of their plan, apparently. They got me with the long con. I have been bamboozled in the most pleasant of ways.<\/p>\n It\u2019s difficult to pin down which movie the Coens are most well known for, although it\u2019s definitely not The Hudsucker Proxy. To you, perhaps, it\u2019s The Big Lebowski. To a current teenager, it might be No Country for Old Men. To your grandparents, it\u2019s likely \u2018nothing.\u2019 To your parents, it\u2019s unquestionably Fargo. This is the film that rocketed the Coens into culture\u2019s collective consciousness, and I seem to recall late 1996 being filled with as many unintentionally poor attempts at intentionally poor Minnesota accents as 2007 would be filled with jokes about Anton Chigurh\u2019s hairstyle. When I finally got around to watching Fargo for myself in 2004, I knew the film in question contained a wood chipper, gratuitous mentions of pancakes, and a totally solid Frances McDormand performance. I assumed William H. Macy was playing an impish gentleman, because that\u2019s how a pre-Shameless Macy operated. All of these suspicions were correct. Fargo was and remains a solid, funny, engaging, well-crafted movie. I saw the same movie everybody else saw, and I saw it again today. This time, though, something about it stuck out at me.<\/p>\n Fargo is about the planned kidnapping of Jerry Lundegaard\u2019s (Macy) wife, and the subsequent investigation done by Marge Gunderson (McDormand), but the themes of the movie are all about what lead Lundegaard to hire Peter Stormare and Steve Buscemi to do said kidnapping in the first place. Jerry is a car salesman, and he is unhappy in his life, partially because neither his child nor his rich father-in-law seem to respect him. The status quo of having a normal, loving wife, and a job selling cars to other normal people does not appeal to Jerry. He needs more, and for whatever reason he decides \u2018more\u2019 involves kidnapping his wife.<\/p>\n Of course, this is not what the movie is about, really, because no great movie is ever literally about what it is figuratively about<\/em>; Fargo is more about the perceived threats to one\u2019s disappearing youth that comes with reaching middle age. The gorgeous, prolonged opening shot of the film<\/a>, showing a car trudging through a North Dakota snowstorm, sets all of this up; the film is about the impossible sameness of reaching middle age, and realizing all that\u2019s around you is an unflinching snowstorm of repetitive white noise. All of our central characters, specifically Jerry, are forty or nearing it, and Jerry\u2019s kidnapping plot is his way to get into a business deal of his own, to finally accomplish something for himself outside of the job he has tied himself to. He\u2019s lost in the snow of middle age, and he wants out so badly that he\u2019s willing to put his wife in danger to escape.<\/p>\n The more likeable character in the movie, and the character everybody is immediately drawn to upon watching the film, is Marge. Some combination of McDormand\u2019s just-a-little-bit-too-exaggerated facial expressions, her accent, and likely the fact that she\u2019s visibly pregnant, make her impossible to hate. Marge is funny, charming, and is the most confident person in the film. She is also the most comfortable within her surroundings, enjoying as much time with her non-kidnapped husband Norm as she can. Marge knows her job, she likes her job, and she likes where she\u2019s at in her life. This is what makes her the movie\u2019s hero; Marge is the one who never wavers, and the one who always knows that her comfortable existence is about as good as things can get.<\/p>\n Perhaps the most important scene in the film comes when Marge meets up with an old friend from high school, Mike Yanagita, a man who calls Marge out of the blue upon seeing her on television conducting a murder investigation. The pair meets up when Marge goes into Minneapolis to continue her investigation, and the ensuing scene is more awkward than even Ricky Gervais\u2019 most uncomfortable work. Many people that watch Fargo find this scene bizarre, as it is the film\u2019s only scene in which nothing relating to the crux of the main story is discussed. I assume there was some argument from one of the film\u2019s financiers as to whether or not it should even be in the final cut. But the scene is of paramount importance to the film, because Mike is an unlikeable disappointment of a man. We are cautiously sympathetic at first, as he explains the death of his wife through tears, but the tide turns a few minutes later, as Marge finds out the truth from a mutual acquaintance. Mike\u2019s wife didn\u2019t die, he simply got divorced before moving into his parents\u2019 home – a quiet declaration that might as well end some pathetic, inverse Rocky Balboa montage.<\/p>\n The final moments of Fargo echo Marge\u2019s feelings on how these confused, aging males are ignoring the good of what\u2019s right in front of them for some money and perceived control. And – despite encapsulating this with a phrase<\/a> that U2 would four years later make me despise – Marge lays out Fargo\u2019s meaning, right before she comfortably crawls into bed with the only adult male in the movie that isn\u2019t an idiot, an asshole, or a criminal. Just a nice, middle-aged artist whose work will soon adorn a three-cent stamp.<\/p>\n In the years following Fargo, the Coen Brothers made a number of good, really good, and \u2013 occasionally – fucking awful films. Their output is always worth seeing, but sometimes it\u2019s not worth seeing twice, particularly in the rare lull when they seem to get a bit too comfortable. The full-on comedies they have produced are always less interesting than their work with fewer laughs per minute, but their humour-infused dramatic films are often great. Toward the end of the past decade, we got two more great examples of this; a film in which a Charlie Watts lookalike teaches Tommy Lee Jones about the inevitability of death, followed by a look at arithmetic-based existentialism. No Country for Old Men told us that the Coens had realized death would come for them soon enough; A Serious Man told us they were worried everything they had ever cared about never mattered in the first place. Despite similar levels of quality, No Country was popular; A Serious Man was mostly unseen, partially because it was a tricky movie to market, but mostly because nobody likes math.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n