AND THEN THERE’S FARGO - WHICH DUCK DO I FEEL SORRY FOR? I’ve covered a few of the big TV shows, but I’ve avoided “Fargo” because I’m not sure what to say. Except - I want to like it very much more than I do. There are some great performances and some greatly skilled film-making, even if I am much less enthusiastic about the story-telling. I should love it because it is pure me - the foibles and eccentricities of village life - and an old episode of Matlock that I directed, Like Fred by Peter Kinloch, echoes in my mind with every frame of it. But the difference may be that Peter wasnt standing his characters commenting on them, he loved them. I loved the original movie largely for this reason. Made by the Coen Brothers in 1996, with Frances McDormand really turning it on (and winning an Oscar) as a pregnant Minnesota police chief investigating some (fairly grisly) local murders. The underlay to this was some quite awful (if sometimes very funny) violence, but Frances McDormand was always the voice of reason, the moral compass in a sometimes immoral world. In the movie, there is a critical moment when villain buried a case containing a million bucks in the snow by a fence along the highway and left a bright red plastic ice-scraper in the snow as a sort of “x” marks the spot. He is never able to reclaim the money because he gets fed into a wood-chipper. This is a great starting point for any sequel or spin-off - what happened to the million bucks? And while it is answered - eventually - in the tv show, this is, for me, where the story telling goes awry, because unless you know the movie, unless you can make the connection, the discovery of the million bucks seems only providential, which it will always be, but more importantly, it isnt seminal to the story - which it should be, because it explains a lot. Instead, we meet the central villain first up, doing something weirdly dastardly involving a naked man in the boot of a car in the middle of winter and so the central focus becomes that villain, Lorne Malvo, played by Billy Bob Thornton in a bad wig. Okay, it’s a way to go, but the second character we meet is Lester Nygaard (Martin Freeman) who seems to be the nice guy, a local dweeb - who then murders his wife. Hmmm? A long, long time ago, Crawfords made a pilot for Matlock Police, all about country cops. The first five or so minutes involved a slightly retarded bloke living in a shack in the bush going about his morning business, which included lots of interaction with wild ducks. Bucolic was the order of the day. Dorothy Crawford, the doyenne of Australian script editors, watched that five minutes in wonder and then said “which duck am I supposed to feel sorry for?” Which is the problem of “Fargo” (tv) in a nutshell - who am I supposed to like, who am I supposed to feel sorry for?” Mostly, we follow Lester Nygaard, who gets into some frightening scrapes, but am I supposed to feel sorry for a man who smashed his wife’s head open with an axe? I’m obviously not supposed to feel sorry for Lorne Malvo, but he seems to achieve most of his villainous effects by something close to magic. I assume he is meant to have an amazing, controlling personality, because no one interferes with him even when he does dastardly things in public - such as dragging a seemingly innocent man through an office along the floor by his tie and none of the office workers do anything other than watch. But this is not the community we have been shown. At one point, an intended victim takes a shower and blood gushes out of the showier head instead of water. It’s Lorne’s mischief again but it is never explained how he did it, and the plumber called the next day can find no evidence of anything untoward, of anything other than water. Hmmm, I said to myself, magic. Again. In the movie, the people of Brainerd, Minnesota, were presented much as they are, country folk, overly nice to each other, and with slightly daffy mannerisms of friendship, largely bought about by the very cruel winters there - they have to be overly nice to each other, and helpful, otherwise their society falls apart. They were presented as simple, trusting folk, but never simple minded. The tv she upends this, and oddest of all - to me - was when Lorne is stopped by a nice young cop, Gus Grimly, (Colin Hanks) in Duluth (the geography gets confusing) but the nice young cop doesnt give him a ticket - or even gets to see his license, because Lorne talks some confounding (to the cop) gooblydegook. I think we are intended to believe that Lorne has a controlling, forceful personality, but I guess the effect depends on whether or not you think Billy Bob Thornton’s personality is that forceful. It doesnt work for me. Gus, the nice young cop, is presented as a moral compass, and he teams up with Molly, a female cop, who is the greater moral compass, but who is reduced to a rather secondary and somewhat passive role. Yes, she twigs early on that there is more to the seminal murder(s) than meets the eye, and yes, she guesses that Lester Nygaard might actually be involved in the dark doings, but she spends a long time getting not-very-far and not being believed when she does. Meanwhile extreme villains pile on extreme villains. Two dastardly men, one of them a deaf mute, are introduced doing dastardly things, but I’m never sure why they are there - who sent them - and what their goal is, other than to find Lorne. I’m just not sure why, because although it is explained, the explanation itself is confusing. They’re certainly entertaining, good for some laughs and some thrills, but they are also victims of coincidence, the mortal enemy of suspense, so that when they find themselves locked in the same jail cell as their intended victim, Lester, I groaned - even thought the subsequent scene is quite fun. Similarly, I groaned when Gus found Lorne - by accident - and arrested him with no evidence for an arrest and was made to look stupid when Lorne produced an alibi that was, at best, dodgy. Perhaps the back story is too complicated for a simple mind like mine to follow? Or perhaps there is a certain condescension at work - that any plot contrivance, however unlikely, is okay because these people are all gullible hicks? I really do want to like it, and I keep watching it hoping that dawn will break. I suspect it has been made by a film academic who loved the original movie and who understood the cinematic language of that movie. And some of the cinematic language is splendid - a wide shot of Lorne replacing a victim’s medicine in a bottle while the victim make his way towards where Lorne is. It’s edge of the seat stuff in a single wide shot. But the eventual effect on me was that Lorne is not only capable of magic but gosh darn lucky, because it starts to like a cinematic contrivance. And still I want to like it (and I do like lots of it) because everything is in place, the cheerful, hick characters and the desolate winter setting together with the counterpoint of well-intentioned hicks with evil-intentioned villains. But in the movie the violence was subsidiary to those characters - here it is in the foreground, and the ducks I am supposed to feel sorry for fly rather aimlessly overhead. https://youtube/watch?v=xZCiyw1ZfB0
Posted on: Sat, 07 Jun 2014 01:05:07 +0000
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