Joel and
Ethan Coen’s Fargo opens,
appropriately, in Fargo, North Dakota, although this is the only scene in the
movie to actually take place in the title location. Over the opening credits we
see a car, barely visible through the fog in the distance as it makes its slow
progression through the snowy, bluish gray landscape. The tan Sierra goes up
and down on the frozen-over roads, occasionally disappearing into snowy voids.
The Coens’ Midwest is bleak and ominous, a mood perfectly underlined by Carter
Burwell’s gloomy score. The brothers and virtuoso director of photography and
long-time collaborator Roger Deakins create an epic landscape of near mythical
proportions, if only for the purpose of contrasting it with the ordinariness
and decidedly unheroic nature of the characters that inhabit it. Contradictions
like this one abound in the Coens’ universe; their work has always defied
definition. They play fast and loose in terms of plot and refuse to be
constrained by the formal imperatives of conventional narrative, stitching
together a number of different genres and in the end transcending such
conventions altogether. Fargo starts
out as a perfect-crime drama, but soon embraces conventions of the noir, the
thriller, and tragedy, all with a big, darkly humorous smile on its lips.
