Fargo (1996 film)

The Coens initially considered William H. Macy for a smaller role, but they were so impressed by his reading that they asked him to come back in and read for the role of Jerry. According to Macy, he was very persistent in getting the role, saying: "I found out that they [the Coen brothers] 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.'"[7] Ethan Coen later remarked, "I don't think either of us [Coen brothers] 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."[8]

The parts of Marge Gunderson, Carl Showalter and Gaear Grimsrud were written with their respective actors in mind. Peter Stormare, who played the role of Gaear, was supposed to play the part of Eddie Dane in the Coens' earlier film Miller's Crossing, but was unable to commit due to commitments to a stage production of Hamlet. When he was not filming, he would visit neighboring places with Swedish sounding names. Stormare noted that his character was different from his real life personality.

At first, Frances McDormand was excited about working with the Coens, but was rather surprised when she found out that they wrote Marge for her. McDormand felt that what separated Marge from other female characters written by the Coens is that the latter fell short. She learned how to use and fire a gun and spent days talking with a police officer that was pregnant much like Marge and also developed a backstory for her character along with John Carroll Lynch. After seeing the movie, McDormand noted that much of Marge was modeled after her sister Dorothy who is a Disciples of Christ minister and chaplain.[9]

Fargo was filmed during the winter of 1995, mainly in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area and around Pembina County, North Dakota.[10] Due to unusually low snowfall totals in central and southern Minnesota that winter, scenes requiring snow-covered landscapes had to be shot in northern Minnesota and northeastern North Dakota, though not in or near the actual towns of Fargo and Brainerd.[11]

Original Paul Bunyan sculpture used in the motion picture Fargo

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.[12] It was demolished in 2003, along with most other buildings on that block of Central Avenue, and replaced by low-income housing.[13] Gustafson's auto dealership was actually Wally McCarthy Oldsmobile in Richfield, 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 along 101st Street NE (near the corner of 143rd Avenue NE) west of Bathgate, North Dakota. The Blue Ox motel/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.[14]

The Lakeside Club, where Marge interviewed the two younger women, was a family restaurant—now closed—in Mahtomedi, Minnesota. The kidnappers' Moose Lake hideout actually 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.[14] 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,[15] and the house where Mr. Mohra described 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.[14]

While none of Fargo was actually 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.[14] After the movie's release, by some accounts, Brainerd was invaded by shovel-toting moviegoers searching for the buried ransom cash, inspired by the spurious "based-on-a-true-story" announcement in the opening credits. In 2001, a Japanese woman named Takako Konishi was found frozen to death near Detroit Lakes, Minnesota. A rumor emerged that she had been searching for the buried money, but her death was actually ruled a suicide.[16]

As with all the Coen brothers' films, except O Brother, Where Art Thou? and Inside Llewyn Davis, the score to Fargo is by Carter Burwell.[17] The main musical motif is based on a Norwegian folk song, "The Lost Sheep" (Norwegian: Den bortkomne sauen).[18]

Other songs featured in the film include: "Big City" by Merle Haggard, heard in the King of Clubs while Jerry meets with Carl and Gaear; "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'" by Boy George, which plays in the garage as Shep works, and "Let's Find Each Other Tonight", a live nightclub performance by José Feliciano that is viewed by Carl and a female escort. In the diner, when Jerry is urging Wade not to get police involved in his wife's kidnapping, Chuck Mangione's "Feels So Good" can be heard faintly in the background. An instrumental version of "Do You Know the Way to San Jose" plays during the scene where Marge and Norm are eating at a buffet. The restaurant scene with Mike Yanagita is accompanied by a piano arrangement of "Sometimes in Winter" by Blood, Sweat & Tears. All the songs heard in the film are featured only as background music, usually on a radio, and do not appear on the soundtrack album.

The soundtrack was released in 1996 on TVT Records, combined with selections from the score to Barton Fink.[17]

The film opens with the following text:

This is a true story. The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.

However, the closing credits bear the standard fictitious persons disclaimer used by works of fiction.[19] Regarding this apparent discrepancy, the Coen brothers claimed that they based their script on an actual criminal event, but wrote a fictional story around it. "We weren't interested in that kind of fidelity," said Joel Coen. "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."[20]

The brothers have modified their explanation more than once. In 1996, Joel Coen told a reporter that—contrary to the opening graphic—the actual murders were not committed in Minnesota.[21][22] 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 claimed that they had never heard of Thompson. After Thompson's death in 2015, Joel Coen changed the explanation again: "[The story was] completely made up. Or, as we like to say, the only thing true about it is that it's a story."[23]

The film's special edition DVD contains yet another account, that the film was inspired by the 1986 murder of Helle Crafts from Connecticut at the hands of her husband, Richard, who disposed of her body through a wood chipper.[24]

There is a long history of authors placing factual disclaimers at the beginning of fictional works; one of the earliest of these is the gothic novel The Castle of Otranto written by Horace Walpole in 1764.

The film's illustrations of "Minnesota nice" and distinctive regional accents and expressions made a lasting impression on audiences; years later, locals reported continuing to field tourist requests to say "Yah, you betcha", and other tag lines from the movie.[25] Dialect coach Liz Himelstein maintained that "the accent was another character". She coached the cast using audiotapes and field trips.[26] Another dialect coach, Larissa Kokernot (who also played one of the prostitutes), noted that the "small-town, Minnesota accent is close to the sound of the Nords and the Swedes", which is "where the musicality comes from". She taught McDormand "Minnesota nice" and the characteristic head-nodding to show agreement.[27] The strong accent spoken by Macy's and McDormand's characters, which was exaggerated for effect, is less common in the Twin Cities, where over 60% of the state's population lives. The Minneapolis and St. Paul dialect is characterized by the Northern Cities Vowel Shift, which is also found in other places in the Northern United States as far east as Rochester, New York.[25]

Frances McDormand (pictured in 2015) garnered critical acclaim for her performance and won the Academy Award for Best Actress.

On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Fargo holds an approval rating of 94% based on 96 reviews, with an average rating of 8.72/10. The site's critical consensus reads: "Violent, quirky, and darkly funny, Fargo delivers an original crime story and a wonderful performance by McDormand."[28] At Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 85 out of 100, based on 24 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[29] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.[30]

Arnold Wayne Jones, writing for the Dallas Observer, called the film an "illuminating amalgam of emotion and thought", praising the directing and writing from the Coen brothers.[31] From Entertainment Weekly, Lisa Schwarzbaum lauded the performance from Frances McDormand and stated that the film was "dizzily rich, witty, and satisfying."[32] In The New Yorker, Anthony Lane singled out McDormand for praise: "Her character—seven months pregnant, polite to a fault, smart yet slow—is only a breath away from caricature, yet McDormand unearths a surprising decency there, and in the process she pretty well rescues the film."[33] USA Today journalist Mike Clark also praised the performance of McDormand:

"McDormand's uproariously sly-spry performance connects with Roger Deakins' bleakly beautiful photography to create one of the Coens' most consistently successful outings, albeit one that plays it even closer to the vest than usual. For a current movie that simply effervesces with the macabre, check out The Young Poisoner's Handbook. For a nifty bit of nastiness from two of our most dependably provocative filmmakers, Fargo will fill the bill."[34]

On the other side of the spectrum, Time magazine film critic Richard Corliss criticized Fargo for its use of Minnesota nice, the accent used in the film. In his review, Corliss stated that "After some superb mannerist films, the Coens are back in the deadpan realist territory of Blood Simple, but without the cinematic elan."[35] (Conversely, Janet Maslin, in the New York Times, deemed Fargo "much more stylish and entertaining" than Blood Simple).[36] James Berardinelli, writing for his own website, ReelThoughts, gave the film three stars out of five, stating that it was "easy to admire what the Coens are trying to do in Fargo, but more difficult to actually like the film."[37]

Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert both ranked Fargo as the best film of 1996,[38] with Ebert later ranking it fourth on his list of the best films of the 1990s.[39] Fargo was added to the National Film Registry by the National Film Preservation Board on December 27, 2006.[5] In 2010, the Independent Film & Television Alliance selected the film as one of its "30 Most Significant Independent Films" of the last 30 years.[40]

Released theatrically in the United States on March 8, 1996, Fargo launched in 36 theaters, and grossed $1,024,137 in its first week.[43] In the film's third week, Fargo was released in 412 theaters, and accumulated a total box office gross of $5,998,890.[44] On March 27, 1997, Fargo had its last viewing in theaters in the United States, closing the domestic gross of the film at $24,281,860.[45] Internationally, Fargo was released in the United Kingdom on May 31, 1996, in Canada on April 5, 1996, and in Australia on June 6, 1996, bringing the film's international gross to an estimated 36 million.[46] All together, Fargo grossed a total of $60,611,975 at the box office.[3]