Fargo, MN Movie Review

I watched Fargo for the first time yesterday and today. I missed it back in 1996, but I certainly heard enough about it in the 22 years since then. It has resulted in phrases like “you betcha” in the “Minnesota nice” accent entering pop culture and apparently the wood chipper scene is pretty famous. It also won about two dozen awards and was nominated for about two dozen more. There’s also a series based on the film on FX.

I didn’t like it much at all. I know I’ll take some heat for this opinion and I’m just as surprised as anyone that I didn’t like it, as I feel some of the other Coen Brothers films are fantastic. No Country for Old Men stands out as a great film, and I consider their follow-up to Fargo, The Big Lebowski in 1998, to be one of the funniest movies ever made.

Part of the problem may be that it’s not that original to me and this is a result of its own success – it was highly original at the time, so I can see why people liked it so much. But, that’s not entirely the reason why I didn’t like it because the movie does have some flaws. The first is its opening text that states it’s a true story. I hate it when obviously fictitious movies do this, and I knew it would be fictitious without even having seen it yet; it reminds me of The Blair Witch Project in that regard.

The second major flaw is that it takes over a half hour of the 1.5-hour movie for Frances McDormand’s character (the sheriff) to enter the movie. McDormand won an Oscar for Best Actress for this film. I was looking forward to her performance, but the truth is, the woman who plays the wife of William H. Macy’s character showed more depth than McDormand before she got kidnapped. The actress’s name is Kristin Rudrüd, and she is known so well that her IMDB photo is a blank thumbnail.

The third major flaw is the pacing – it gets boring and tedious about two-thirds of the way through, and the movie isn’t that long. I apparently can watch about an hour of cars driving back and forth on snow-covered roads before getting bored. At this point, I switched from this movie to the much more engrossing Sharp Objects episode that had just been released on HBOgo, and Sharp Objects is even slower paced than Fargo. I then watched the remainder of Fargo tonight.

Finally, I know I’m stupid now, but 99.9% of this film took place in Minnesota. Is Fargo not in North Dakota? I’m not sure if I missed something here or not.

Grade: C-