Movie Review: Fargo (1996)

A blood-soaked black comedy, Fargo is a captivating classic. Joel and Ethan Coen conjure up a mood of dark doom set against a bleak snow-covered landscape, enlivened by unforgettable personalities and rampant "Minnesota nice" behaviour.

In Minneapolis, car salesman Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) is buried under a mountain of debt and has no apparent legal solutions to dig himself out. In desperation, Jerry meets career criminals Carl (Steve Buscemi) and Gaear (Peter Stormare) in Fargo, North Dakota, supplies them with a car, and hires them to stage the kidnapping of his wife Jean. Jerry intends to get the ransom money from Wade, his rich father-in-law, and then split it with the kidnappers.

While Carl is thoughtful and just wants to get the job done, Gaear is silent and prone to extreme violence. After a clumsy break-in Carl and Gaear do succeed in kidnapping Jean, but on the highway near the town of Brainerd they are stopped by a highway patrol officer. Gaear brutally kills the patrolman and, for good measure, two witnesses who happen to be driving by. A staged hostage-taking is transformed to a triple murder investigation.

Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) is the Brainerd chief of police, and seven months pregnant. Her investigations of the highway murders lead her to Jerry's car dealership, and his shifty behaviour doesn't help his cause. With the noose tightening around him, Jerry is desperate to close the ransom deal, but Wade insists on delivering the money, resulting in many more dead bodies. Marge has to quickly follow the trail of violence to put an end to the bloody carnage.

Fargo is a brilliant crime film, one of the finest achievements of the 1990s, and the jewel in the Coen brothers' crown. Working from their own script, the Coens find the dark soul of evil against the chilly white fields of snow, and juxtapose dry humour with unspeakable violence. In the most staid and seemingly content of mid-America environments, the story throws up a desperate husband, a botched hostage taking and heartless killers prone to extreme violence. All that stands between evil running amok and the restoration of some semblance of sanity is a pregnant small town cop.

Although the film opens with the claim that the events portrayed are factual, this is part of the Coens' humour. In fact, the movie is only loosely inspired by a vaguely similar incident that occurred in Connecticut. Equally unhinging is the name Fargo: one scene is set in that city, and the rest of the story takes place across the border in Minnesota.

Fargo draws its radiance from four unforgettable characters. Macy successfully portrays Lundegaard as a man so in over his head that he is uncomfortable in own skin, just one step ahead of total despair. Buscemi creates an almost sympathetic character in Carl, a criminal who can only be described by all who meet him as "kinda funny looking". Violent only when driven over the edge by the apparent ineptitude of others, Carl is dangerously funny and always foul-mouthed.

Stormare's Gaear is nothing but silence, incessant smoking, and brutality. This is a criminal who does not hesitate to kill quickly and at close range, and he does not really care who knows it. It is Gaear who derails Jerry's plan and sets off the avalanche of killings, and none of it seems to bother him. And finally McDormand's Marge slowly takes over as the heart of the film, almost cheerfully overcoming the challenges of her pregnancy to doggedly untangle the web of murders and bring the case to a close, while looking after her marriage and fending off a semi-psychotic suitor.

The Coens direct with elegant understatement, allowing the scenery, the strength of the story, the exceptional characters and Carter Burwell's evocative soundtrack to breathe deep and confidently carry the film forward. Fargo's combination of character-driven comedy and cruelty is movie-making at its best.

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Movie Review: True Grit (2010)

Ethan and Joel Coen turn their attention to a classic Western tale of justice served as seen through the doggedly determined eyes of a young woman. In True Grit, the triple Coen signatures of grand cinematography, dangerous humour and bursts of sudden violence flourish with the help of a stellar cast.

Precocious 14 year old Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) arrives in the rough frontier town of Fort Smith. Her father has been killed by the outlaw Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), and no one seems to care: Chaney has fled into the wild territories, and the law cannot be bothered to chase after him.

Mattie wants to bring Chaney to justice. Through an effective combination of persistence, badgering, pleading and financial reward, Mattie joins forces with US Marshall Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) and Texas Ranger Laboef (Matt Damon) and they set off to find Chaney. Cogburn is an aging, hard-drinking law man known for having true grit and for killing more often than capturing outlaws. Laboef has been on Chaney's trail for a long time: Chaney has apparently also killed a Texas senator.

Cogburn and Laboef do not get along, and soon Mattie is having trouble keeping the group together. Eventually they do catch up with Chaney as he rides with the gang of Lucky Ned Pepper. Cogburn and Laboef are outnumbered, out-gunned, and uncoordinated, but with Mattie's help they need to take the initiative and hand out frontier justice.

The story of True Grit is built on the shoulders of young Mattie Ross, and the film is carried by a remarkable performance from newcomer Hailee Steinfeld. Selected after an open casting call attracted 15,000 applicants, Steinfeld demonstrates the maturity of a veteran as the sharp, unwavering Mattie. She steps into centre stage with a calm confidence that dominates the movie and propels the actions of all the other characters.

Jeff Bridges has a lot of fun mumbling his way through mostly incomprehensible dialogue while consuming enough alcohol to flood the west. His eye-patched Rooster Cogburn is a philosophical storyteller who is violent when he needs to be, which is as often as he can manage to turn every threatening situation into bedlam. Matt Damon is lost beneath the facial hair of a Texas Ranger drowning in long-winded pontifications, and most of what he says gets on the nerves of Cogburn, whose return insults are shorter and sharper. Bridges, Damon and Steinfeld make for an entertainingly strained trio who all need each other more than they care to admit.

The Coens alternate between the characters developing and the violent events unfolding, all filmed with eloquence and a respectful admiration for a western landscape as harsh and honest as the people who inhabit it.

In a genre as enduring as the Western, it's difficult to bring too much originality to a film like True Grit. It may not smell overwhelmingly fresh, but what is more important is the comfortable mix of worn leather, cheap liquor, rolled tobacco and gun powder in just the right quantities.

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Movie Review: Burn After Reading (2008)

In a movie in which every character is being mean to every other character, and all the characters are either inept, self-obsessed, or just plain stupid, at least one character needs to be sympathetic enough to make us care amid the oozing awfulness. Burn After Reading fails this test, and it simply disintegrates into a painful spectacle where every attempt at humour or satire falls flat. That the usually brilliant Coen brothers cooked up this turkey just adds bitterness to the bad aftertaste.

Chad (Brad Pitt) and Linda (Frances McDormand) are employees at a scuzzy gym managed by Ted (Richard Jenkins), and they stumble upon a CD that appears to contain CIA secrets. The files on the CD belong to Osborne (John Malkovich), a CIA agent on the back-end of his career, and whose marriage to Katie (Tilda Swinton) is imploding. Chad and Linda, in way over their heads, attempt to blackmail Osborne, primarily because Linda wants to finance her plastic surgery.

Katie meanwhile is having an affair with Harry (George Clooney), a Treasury Department agent, who at the same time starts dating Linda, not knowing that Linda is involved in blackmailing his lover's husband. As the blackmail plot unravels, Linda and Chad try to sell the CD to the Russians, and the consequences are bad for everyone, and lethal for a few.

All this rich material for satire on spies, spying, extra-marital affairs and obsession with fitness must have looked hilarious on paper; on the screen, all the targets are missed. The characters come across as failed cartoons drawn with thick crayons. No one appears to act on any idea unless the action is idiotic, and the persistent meanness and dumbness with which all the characters treat each other results in all of them deserving whatever gutter fate the movie chooses to assign.

The high-powered, all-star cast bumbles along not quite knowing if this is the latest Ocean's 11 spin-off or a discarded sub-plot from Syriana. The lack of any character depth or meaningful evolution leaves the acting talent out in the cold. Malkovich as Osborne Cox is given the most to work with, but while his character is entertaining, it remains strictly one-dimensional.

After the Coen's brilliant No Country For Old Men, Burn After Reading is a steep drop in form. Any movie in which the Russian embassy spooks are the most sympathetic characters is bound to be in no small amount of trouble.






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