Here we have a black comedy that is often macabre and frequently funny. Car dealer Jerry Lundesgaard (William H. Macy) hires two very odd characters, played by Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare, to kidnap his wife so that he can share the ransom with them to escape some financial difficulties. Everything goes wrong and, when the bodies start to mount up, seven months pregnant police chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) sets out on the trail. Sounds crazy? It is – but most enjoyably so.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is a Coen brothers production: both wrote the script, Ethan produced, and Joel directed, while McDormand was married to Joel. The terrain is a character in itself: the plot begins in Fargo, a town on the west of North Dakota, but most of the action is in the centre of neighbouring Minnesota, the Coens home state. The brothers make effective use of the location in their script, since there is a good deal of ‘Minnesota nice’ (the reputation for mild-mannered behaviour) and use of an exaggerated version of the local, Scandinavian-influenced accent (endless occasions of\u00a0“Yah, you betcha”<\/em>).<\/p>\n\n\n\n The last time that I saw “Fargo” was in 2026 at the British Film Institute when it was preceded by an interview with the film’s cinematographer Roger Deakins (then 77). He recalled that, setting the story in the depths of winter required lots of snow, but strangely there was a lack of it in central Minnesota that year, so they had do do filming in the north of the state and bring in snow machines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Running just 97 minutes, the film won Academy Awards for both the Coens (Best Original Screenplay) and McDormand (Best Actress).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Here we have a black comedy that is often macabre and frequently funny. Car dealer Jerry Lundesgaard (William H. Macy) hires two very odd characters, played by Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare, to kidnap his wife so that he can share the ransom with them to escape some financial difficulties. Everything goes wrong and, when […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30225","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cultural-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30225","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30225"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30225\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30229,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30225\/revisions\/30229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30225"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30225"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30225"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}