One of the sharpest scenes in Fargo is about a charge for paint sealant. Jerry Lundegaard has already agreed to sell a couple a car without TruCoat. Now he’s explaining why they’ll have to pay for it anyway. He goes off to consult his boss, talks football with another salesman, and comes back offering a discount on the charge they never agreed to. William H. Macy plays Jerry as meek and apologetic, even when the customer has figured out exactly what he’s doing.
Jerry is a sales manager at his father-in-law’s dealership, and he’s in trouble. A lender wants vehicle identification numbers for cars Jerry has apparently pledged as collateral. He stalls. He also asks his father-in-law, Wade Gustafson (Harve Presnell), to finance a real estate deal. And he hires Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi) and Gaear Grimsrud (Peter Stormare) to kidnap his wife, Jean, so he can collect ransom money from Wade. When the kidnapping goes awry and a roadside shooting follows, Brainerd police chief Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand) takes the case.
We never learn where the loan money went. I like that the Coens leave the question hanging. Jerry’s desperation is plain enough, and his solution tells us more about him than an explanation of his debts would. He figures he can turn his own wife into leverage and leave her father to pay. Wade balks at the ransom and insists on taking charge. His fear for Jean feels genuine, and so does his conviction that he knows how to handle the men who took her. Meanwhile, the prospect of ransom money gives Carl and Gaear another reason to distrust each other. Jean and her son, Scotty, have no say in any of these decisions.
The Coens wrote this 1996 crime comedy together, with Joel credited as director and Ethan as producer. The snowy roads of Minnesota and North Dakota give the film much of its character. In the opening, a car slowly emerges from a nearly white screen while Carter Burwell’s mournful score, with its Hardanger fiddle, makes an ordinary drive feel ominous. The film can turn funny just as easily. Carl can barely stand a quiet car ride, and Gaear can barely stand Carl. Their bickering is some of the funniest dialogue in the film.
Marge brings a different kind of patience to the film. She’s visibly pregnant, matter-of-fact about her work, and willing to listen even when the person across from her is making things awkward. Over dinner, her old classmate Mike Yanagita tries to slide in beside her. Marge asks him to move back to his side of the booth and hears him out. When she later learns that he lied about his wife, it’s worth thinking back to her first conversation with Jerry. The next time she visits the dealership, she presses him on the cars. McDormand keeps that same courteous tone even as Jerry grows agitated. He’s used to people giving him the benefit of the doubt, and Marge has questions he still needs to answer.
TF’s Notes
Fargo opens by telling us that the events took place in Minnesota in 1987. The closing credits play another trick, using Prince’s symbol to credit him as the performer who played the “Victim in the Field.” That credit is a gag.
Spoiler warning. The following paragraph mentions a scene near the end of the film.
I once saw a documentary that linked Fargo to the 1986 murder of Helle Crafts in Newtown, Connecticut. Her husband, Richard Crafts, was convicted of killing her. Prosecutors presented evidence that he used a wood chipper to dispose of her remains. Joel Coen later pointed to that Connecticut case as the inspiration for the wood-chipper detail. He also cited a separate auto-financing fraud as an inspiration for Jerry’s dealings with the lender. The Coens built a fictional kidnapping story around those details.