Tag Archives: Coen brothers

Deja Viewed: Fargo, Season II


One reason that Fargo the TV series is not more popular is because people think that it’s the small-screen version of Fargo the movie.

The error is understandable. Television has made a cottage industry out of taking films and stretching them into longer (more profitable) home entertainment. Think Snowpiercer, Watchmen, Friday Night Lights. Movies, but with commercials.

Fargo is not a movie with commercials. Fargo is a Coen Brothers trivia game with commercials. No Country for Old Men, The Big Lebowski, Miller’s Crossing and just about every movie Joel and Ethan Coen ever made are referenced in the series, which has spanned four seasons (so far), a half-century of ”true” crime stories and one zealous Coen Bros. fanboy, show runner Noah Hawley. If you play a Coens-reference drinking game, you are hospital-drunk by the half hour mark of any episode.

Hawley pays homage to the Coens the way Paul Thomas Anderson kneels at the altar of Stanley Kubrick: with an awe, reverence and an attention to the master’s style that cannot help but mimic brilliance, thus producing its own.

And nowhere is that more evident than in the second season, in 2015, perhaps the greatest 10-part crime story ever told. Which makes sense, since it’s a sly take on the greatest one-part crime story ever told: The Book of Job.

The Coens (who serve as executive producers) and Hawley have never said as much, and the season’s symbolism — particularly the neon blue UFO that plays such a critical role — is debated even now.

But the Coen Brothers have made careers out of religious parables, and Hawley has likewise chocked the series with biblical references. And season two is Sunday school with action sequences.

Consider these divine parallels with the bible and Fargo’s 1979 ”true crime” story about a couple that stumbles into a massacre at a Minnesota diner (spoilers abound):

  • The series begins when the target of the killing (Joan Cusack) tells a cautionary tale about Job’s plight to her murderer.
  • The hero, Trooper Lou Solverson (Patrick Wilson) is a man of unwavering virtue seemingly cursed by evil. Criminals menace him, cowards undercut him, his wife has cancer and his entire family faces existential uncertainty.
  • The villain, O’Hanzee Dent (Zahn McClarnon), pursues our hapless couple with a devilish determination — with flames as his licking backdrop.
  • The series ends with a cryptic conversation between the Devil (Hanzee) and an unnamed character known only as ”The Book.” The Book explains that the outcome of the ordeal was never in doubt. Is that you, God?

The story of Job seems tailor-made for the Coens, because no one has ever known quite what to make of Job.

The title character of the Book of Job is a confounding figure for Christians, Muslims, Jews, and those of any faith who have tried to incorporate the story over millennia. The tale goes like this: Job is a perfectly righteous and God-fearing man whose good deeds have brought him prosperity—children, an estate, good health. But then God enters a wager with Satan, who claims he can make even goodly Job curse the deity. Soon, Job’s servants are killed. His children are killed. He is afflicted with painful boil. His life is a waking nightmare. But he refuses to curse God for what has befallen him. When he is at death’s door, God mysteriously spares him.

Similarly, Solverson refuses to surrender his belief in the good of people or the rule of law. He, too, is brought to death’s door until a mysterious savior: the Close Encounters-style UFO. In a literal Deus Ex Machina, the orb distracts a killer, allowing the hero to shoot himself out of an impossible pickle.

Much has been made of the UFO, its message, and Fargo’s larger statement about humankind’s treatment of each other.

But, like Barton Fink, Blood Simple and No Country, bafflements may be the point. The Coens love bafflements. Apparently, so does Hawley.

And, for the record, this is not a true story. Just a timeless one.

https://youtu.be/D5HDbBm6doU

This is a True Story.

 

Let’s get this out of the way now: Complaining about Fargo is a little like complaining about a Ferrari that stalls. Ultimately, you’re just bitching about wealth. At some point, you need to get over yourself and realize you’re lucky to have a kickass set of wheels.

As it is was with Fargo, one of the best television series in the lore of television series. When the show misses a piston, it still laps most competitors.

But let’s not mince words: Fargo misfired in its finale, which ended its season last night (and possibly for good, as creator Noah Hawley admits he has no plans — or ideas — for a season 4). And while no one could reasonably claim that the Coen brothers homage went out with a whimper, it did conclude with a muffled bang, like an execution beneath a pillow.

This is a long way of saying spoilers abound.

Unlike the previous two seasons, this iteration of the series ended on an intentionally (as Hawley told USA Today’s Bill Keveney) on a cloudy fade-to-black: with hero Gloria Burgle and villain V.M. Varga staring at each other in a police station, vowing to defeat one another.

The scene is, to a small degree, a violation of the Coen brothers ethos: That virtue defeats vice — even when it doesn’t win. Such was the case in the movie Fargo. And The Big Lebowski. And Raising Arizona. And every one of their films with a religious undercurrent. Which is every one of their films.

Including No Country for Old Men, the movie most critics cite as the influence on season 3. But that’s incorrect. While Anton Chigurh, who played Death in the flick, did indeed walk away from the chaos to haunt another day, he did claim the soul of Sheriff Ed Tom Bell. That Bell (played by Tommy Lee Jones) survived came thanks to him screwing up his courage and facing Death (which fled), another consistent through-line of the brothers Coen.

Here, however, bravery was not rewarded. I wonder that Joel and Ethan thought of that. And this:

  • The exposition Fargo 3 had lots of talking. Burgle does a lot of audible thinking: Was this a robbery gone wrong? Is she the character she’s reading about in her latest book, The Planet Wyh? Is life a morass of random collisions? These are all questions the Coen brothers love to ask. Just not aloud.
  • The beauty For the first time in the series, major characters were beautiful. Carrie Coon and Mary Elizabeth Winstead are model-pretty. That should never work against a TV show, but it’s standard practice in network television to add beauty to a show that’s desperate for ratings, like Homicide and The Office in their waning years. In the Coen universe (and the first two seasons of the show), beauty equals vanity.
  • The money Joel and Ethan Coen once told me that they don’t care where the money winds up in their movies. In fact, they prefer that it goes missing (perhaps because it’s symbolically the root of evil?). But in the season 3 finale, not only are the millions found. They’re given to Mr. Wrench. It’s a wonderful touch, but not necessarily Fargoesque.

And finally, the show was decidedly detached from the first two iterations, which were blended so seamlessly they could play as one, 20-hour movie. The millions thrown to Hawley and FX for a third installment may have been too enticing. Who turns that down?

And there were still moments of unmitigated brilliance. The ethereal bowling alley conversations between Ray Wise (who played a version of Peter at the pearly) and the series’ most heroic and villainous characters may constitute the best scenes of the entire show. The animated story of the droid Minsky is a short film within itself.

Alas, time likely spells the end of Fargo. If so, it puts the series in the pantheon of great-but-brief shows: Rome, Twin Peaks, The Office (British version), True Detective (and that was good for only the first season). All accomplished brevity, soul of wit, yaddy yaddy.

So it may be for Fargo, where the names have been changed out of respect for the dead and request of the living. But the rest was told exactly as it occurred. Brilliantly.