Fargo (1996 film)
Fargo is a 1996 black comedy and crime drama film written, directed, produced and edited by Joel and Ethan Coen. It stars Frances McDormand, William H. Macy, Steve Buscemi, Harve Presnell, and Peter Stormare. McDormand plays police chief Marge Gunderson, who investigates after a car salesman, Jerry Lundegaard, hires two dimwitted criminals to kidnap his wife to extort a ransom from her wealthy father.
Filmed in the United States in late 1995, Fargo premiered at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival, where it competed for the Palme d'Or. Joel Coen won the festival's Prix De La Mise En Scène. The film was a critical and commercial success, earning particular acclaim for the Coens' direction and script and the performances of McDormand, Macy and Buscemi. Fargo received seven Oscar nominations at the 69th Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actor for Macy, winning two: Best Actress for McDormand and Best Original Screenplay for the Coens.
In 1998, the American Film Institute named Fargo one of the 100 greatest American films, the most recent film on the list at point, but it was delisted in 2007. In 2006, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". An FX television series based on the film, Fargo, premiered in 2014.
Plot
In 1987, Jerome "Jerry" Lundegaard is the executive sales manager of a Minneapolis car dealership owned by his father-in-law, Wade Gustafson. Desperate for money, he plans to have his wife, Jean, kidnapped. On the recommendation of dealership mechanic and parolee Shep Proudfoot, Jerry meets Gaear Grimsrud and Carl Showalter at a bar in Fargo, North Dakota. Gaear and Carl agree to kidnap Jean in exchange for a new Oldsmobile Cutlass Ciera and half of the $80,000 ransom Jerry intends to extort from Wade.Believing he has secured a $750,000 loan from Wade for a lucrative real estate deal, Jerry unsuccessfully tries to call off the kidnapping. Wade and his accountant Stan Grossman inform Jerry that Wade will handle the deal himself, offering Jerry only a modest finder's fee. Carl and Gaear kidnap Jean and transport her to a remote cabin in Moose Lake. A state trooper stops them near Brainerd for not displaying temporary registration tags. The trooper rejects Carl's clumsy bribe attempt and orders Carl out of the car. The trooper hears Jean whimpering in the back seat, so Gaear shoots the trooper dead, then kills two passersby who witnessed the scene.
Brainerd police chief Marge Gunderson, who is seven months pregnant, begins investigating. She correctly deduces that the dead trooper was ticketing a car with dealer plates. She later learns that two men driving a dealership vehicle checked into a nearby motel with two call girls and placed a call to Shep. Marge visits Wade's dealership, where Shep feigns ignorance and Jerry nervously insists no cars are missing. While in Minneapolis, Marge reconnects with Mike Yanagita, a high school classmate. Mike awkwardly tries to romance her before breaking down and telling her his wife has died.
Jerry tells Wade the kidnappers have demanded $1 million and will deal only through him. In light of the three murders, Carl demands that Jerry hand over the $80,000 he believes is the entire ransom. Shep finds Carl with a call girl in Shep's Minneapolis apartment and beats him in retaliation for bringing Shep to the police's attention. Carl angrily calls Jerry and demands that he bring the money immediately. Wade insists on delivering the ransom and meets Carl at a parking garage. Wade refuses to hand over the money without seeing his daughter, so Carl shoots him. Wade fires back, wounding Carl in the jaw. Carl kills Wade and a garage attendant, then drives away with the ransom.
On the way to Moose Lake, Carl discovers the briefcase contains $1 million. He takes out $80,000 to split with Gaear and buries the rest in the snow alongside the highway. Marge learns from a friend that Yanagita lied; he has no wife and is mentally ill. Reflecting on this, Marge returns to Wade's dealership. An agitated Jerry again insists no cars are missing and tells Marge he will double-check the inventory. Marge sees Jerry driving off the lot and calls the state police.
At the cabin, Carl finds that Gaear killed Jean because she would not be quiet. Carl says they should split up and leave immediately, and they argue over who will keep the Ciera. Carl insults Gaear and attempts to leave with the car, but Gaear kills him with an axe. Marge drives to Moose Lake, tipped off by a local bartender who overheard a customer brag about killing someone. She sees the Ciera, then discovers Gaear feeding Carl's body into a woodchipper. Gaear attempts to flee, but Marge shoots him in the leg and arrests him. Shortly after, Jerry is arrested by state troopers at a motel outside Bismarck, North Dakota.
Marge's husband, Norm, tells her the Postal Service has selected his painting of a mallard for a 3-cent postage stamp and complains that the Hautman brothers painting won the competition for a 29-cent stamp. Marge reminds him that smaller denomination stamps make up the difference between the face value of old stamps and the new cost of first-class postage. Norm is reassured, and the couple happily anticipates the birth of their child.
Cast
Production
Casting
The Coens initially considered William H. Macy for a smaller role, but they were so impressed by his reading that they asked him to read for the role of Jerry. According to Macy, he was persistent in getting the role, saying: "I found out that they were auditioning in New York still, so I got my jolly, jolly Lutheran ass on an airplane and walked in and said, 'I want to read again because I'm scared you're going to screw this up and hire someone else.' I actually said that. You know, you can't play that card too often as an actor. Sometimes it just blows up in your face, but I said, 'Guys, this is my role. I want this. Ethan Coen later said, "I don't think either of us realised what a tough acting challenge we were handing Bill Macy with this part. Jerry's a fascinating mix of the completely ingenuous and the utterly deceitful. Yet he's also guileless; even though he set these horrible events in motion, he's surprised when they go wrong."Frances McDormand learned how to use and fire a gun, spent days talking with a pregnant police officer and developed a backstory for her character along with John Carroll Lynch, who played her husband. She said she may have modeled Marge on her sister, a chaplain at a women's maximum-security prison.
Filming
Fargo was filmed during the winter of 1995, mainly in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area and around Pembina County, North Dakota. Due to unusually low snowfall totals in central and southern Minnesota, scenes requiring snow-covered landscapes had to be shot in northern Minnesota and northeastern North Dakota, though not near the towns of Fargo and Brainerd. Cinematographer Roger Deakins used an Arriflex 35 BL-4 camera.File:Movie Fargo Paul Bunyan.jpg|thumb|Original Paul Bunyan sculpture created by Rick Heinrichs
Jerry's initial meeting with Carl and Gaear was shot at a pool hall and bar called the King of Clubs in the northeast section of Minneapolis. It was demolished in 2003, along with most other buildings on that block of Central Avenue, and replaced by low-income housing. Wade's car dealership was filmed at Wally McCarthy Oldsmobile in Richfield, Minnesota, a southern suburb of Minneapolis. The site is now occupied by Best Buy's national corporate headquarters. The 24-foot Paul Bunyan statue was built for the film on Pembina County Highway 1, four miles west of Bathgate, North Dakota, near the Canadian border. The Blue Ox truckstop was Stockmen's Truck Stop in South St. Paul, which is still in business. Ember's, the restaurant where Jerry discusses the ransom drop with Gustafson, was located in St. Louis Park, the Coens' hometown; the building now houses a medical outpatient treatment center.
The strip club where Marge interviews the two call girls was two separate locations. Its exterior was the Lakeside Club in Mahtomedi, Minnesota, and interior the Loch Ness Lounge in Houlton, Wisconsin. The kidnappers' Moose Lake hideout stood on the shore of Square Lake, near May, Minnesota. The cabin was relocated to Barnes, Wisconsin, in 2002. The Edina police station where the interior police headquarters scenes were filmed is still in operation but has been completely rebuilt. The Carlton Celebrity Room was an actual venue in Bloomington, Minnesota, and José Feliciano did once appear there, but it had been closed for almost ten years when filming began. The Feliciano scene was shot at the Chanhassen Dinner Theatre in Chanhassen, near Minneapolis. The ransom drop was filmed in two adjacent parking garages on South 8th Street in downtown Minneapolis. Scenes in the Lundegaards' kitchen were shot in a private home on Pillsbury Avenue in Minneapolis, and the house where Mr. Mohra describes the "funny looking little guy" to police is in Hallock, in northwest Minnesota. The motel "outside of Bismarck", where the police finally catch up with Jerry, is the Hitching Post Motel in Forest Lake, north of Minneapolis. While none of Fargo was filmed in Fargo, the Fargo-Moorhead Convention & Visitors Bureau exhibits original script copies and several props used in the film, including the wood chipper prop.
Music
As with most Coen brothers films, the score was composed by Carter Burwell. The main motif is based on a Norwegian folk song, "The Lost Sheep". The soundtrack was released in 1996 on TVT Records, combined with selections from the score to Barton Fink.Claims of factual basis
The film opens with the following text:The Coen brothers said that they based their script on an actual criminal event, but wrote a fictional story around it. Joel said: "We weren't interested in that kind of fidelity. The basic events are the same as in the real case, but the characterizations are fully imagined ... If an audience believes that something's based on a real event, it gives you permission to do things they might otherwise not accept." In 1996, Joel Coen told a reporter that—contrary to the opening graphic—the actual murders were not committed in Minnesota. Many Minnesotans speculated that the story was inspired by T. Eugene Thompson, a St. Paul attorney who was convicted of hiring a man to murder his wife in 1963, near the Coens' hometown of St. Louis Park; but the Coens said that they had never heard of Thompson. After Thompson's death in 2015, Joel Coen changed the explanation again: " completely made up. Or, as we like to say, the only thing true about it is that it's a story."
The special edition DVD contains an account that Fargo was inspired by the 1986 murder of Helle Crafts, a Danish–American flight attendant from Connecticut at the hands of her husband, Richard, who disposed of her body through a wood chipper. In a 1998 article, the fact-checking website Snopes concluded that the "true story" claim was a prank of the kind the Coen brothers often inserted in their films. Snopes said that doubters should note that a fictitious persons disclaimer, used in works of fiction, is at the end of the film.