Do you have a video playback issues?
Please disable AdBlocker in your browser for our website.
Due to a high volume of active users and service overload, we had to decrease the quality of video streaming. Premium users remains with the highest video quality available. Sorry for the inconvinience it may cause. Donate to keep project running.
Jerry Lundegaard is a car salesman in Minneapolis who has gotten himself into debt and is so desperate for money that he hires two thugs to kidnap his own wife. Jerry will collect the ransom from her wealthy father, paying the thugs a small portion and keeping the rest to satisfy his debts. The scheme collapses when the thugs shoot a state trooper. From the moment of the kidnapping, things go wrong and what was supposed to be a non-violent affair turns bloody with more blood added by the minute. Jerry is upset at the bloodshed, which turns loose a pregnant sheriff from Brainerd, MN who is tenacious in attempting to solve the three murders in her jurisdiction.
You have to grant the Coens their due as creators of suspense, mood and plotting, and for their ability to color the most monstrous crimes with an undeniably funny sense of the absurd.
Fargo, with its grotesque murders and cheery detectives, is a cold gem that takes us to the far north. Its seemingly pitiless light opens up the realms of darkness concealed beneath that world of white.
Returning to the horror-comic vein that launched their careers, director Joel Coen and producer Ethan Coen pepper their new picture with so much humor that the occasional bursts of sheer mayhem seem more ridiculous than revolting.
A few scenes go around in circles, as if snow-blind, and the humor may be too inward and contorted for some tastes. But McDormand brings order to the weirdness and warms it up.
McDormand is brilliant, Macy terrific, Presnell perfect, Buscemi fabulous. And Stormare is fascinating as one of the deadliest and most horrid big-screen killers in recent memory. Fargo is a down-and-dirty doozy.