Ethan Coen’s latest solo film, , could be generously called “slight,” or less generously, “bad.” While he dabbles in capers so light they risk floating away, his brother Joel’s only solo work to date is 2021’s The Tragedy of Macbeth—a well-regarded film, yet so self-serious that you might think Shakespeare himself would suggest dialing it back a notch. Naturally, these solo efforts have raised questions about the sensibilities each brother brought to their many collaborative projects, including the career-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 returns of Raising Arizona—their only other notable financial hit by 1996. Having since spawned [content omitted], and remaining one of their better-known and more accessible movies, rewatching Fargo feels like getting a peek at how the final pieces were added to their creative “secret sauce.”
The gruff National Review argued that Fargo “could have been a nice little film noir if they hadn’t mixed it with black comedy, absurdism, and folksy farce”—but those elements were precisely the point. Fargo feels like Blood Simple, the Coens’ neo-noir debut, was run through a genre woodchipper, resulting in a pitch-black comedy about the emptiness of greed. It plays with you from the moment it opens with a blatant lie about being a “true story”—Joel Coen noted, “If an audience believes something’s based on a real event, it gives you permission to do things they might otherwise reject.”
That semi-believability starts with William H. Macy’s Jerry Lundegaard, a meek car salesman with a harebrained scheme to pay off his debts by kidnapping his own wife and sending the ransom to his wealthy father-in-law. Lundegaard holds a (figurative) place among Hollywood’s greatest wimps—a sniveling pushover constantly shocked by the bloody chaos his plotting accidentally unleashes.
His status as a pitifully small-scale character makes him perfect for this stripped-down film, where understated shots of snowy highways and barren forests stand in stark contrast to the bombastic flop that was the Coens’ previous movie, The Hudsucker Proxy. It takes quite a while for Frances McDormand’s hero cop, Marge Gunderson, to even appear, and her low-key, footwork-focused investigation is punctuated by moments of domestic calm. This isn’t the typical noir setup of a drunken divorcee detective vs. a cold-blooded career criminal.
The body count, though, is what you’d expect—if not higher. Gunderson’s calm, polite handling of so much bloodshed feels like a prototype for Tommy Lee Jones’ sheriff navigating the wake of Anton Chigurh’s rampage in No Country For Old Men, though she keeps a sense of optimism that Jones’ character never manages. Gunderson meets a range of odd characters (a hallmark of Coen films), but she only passes judgment once—when arresting Peter Stormare’s laconic thug—scolding him for killing over mere money, and on such a beautiful day, no less.
This makes Fargo both relentlessly bleak and strangely upbeat, with Gunderson’s tranquil home life serving as both literal and figurative shelter from the storm. Innocent bystanders face tough odds in movies like this, but it’s still possible to live without being dragged down by others’ cruel nonsense. Not to dwell on one flop too much, but maybe this is why Fargo works while Honey Don’t felt like Ethan Coen left a perfectly good neo-noir premise out to melt in the California sun. No matter how much wackiness you add—and Fargo has plenty—it helps if your movie is about something.
Perhaps fittingly, a film that opens with a phony claim of realism spawned a false legend about a Japanese woman dying of exposure while searching for the money Steve Buscemi hides before meeting a grisly fate. In reality, the lovelorn and depressed Takako Konishi traveled to America to commit suicide—but the fake story inspired 2014’s Kumiko, the Treasure Hunter, about a solitary Japanese office worker who becomes obsessed with Fargo and sets out to find Buscemi’s treasure. A sad, dreamy tale where Kumiko knows Fargo is fictional yet is completely convinced the treasure will appear for her, its mimicry of Fargo’s “true story” disclaimer makes it a strange coda about how movies worm their way into our cultures and lives.
Fargo has certainly done that—whether it’s the film’s darker moments sticking in viewers’ memories or the mere mention of its title evoking exaggerated Minnesotan accents and lines like, “You’re darn tootin!” As for the Coens, they followed Fargo with a long string of mostly hits that balanced their memorable character work with their more cartoonish instincts. Not to say the two need to be joined at the hip forever, but three decades later, Fargo remains the purest example of their individual approaches bouncing off each other in all the right ways.
Fargo is streaming .