{"id":13275,"date":"2017-01-18T09:01:01","date_gmt":"2017-01-18T17:01:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/?p=13275"},"modified":"2017-01-18T12:14:25","modified_gmt":"2017-01-18T20:14:25","slug":"to-see-or-not-to-see-fargo-a-film-for-the-farrago-of-winter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/2017\/01\/18\/to-see-or-not-to-see-fargo-a-film-for-the-farrago-of-winter\/","title":{"rendered":"To See or Not to See<\/em>: Fargo<\/em> a film for the farrago of winter"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Fargo
\n<\/i>5\/5<\/p>\n

As the thermometer scrapes zero and the ground outside crunches in the morning, dirt frozen, mud like chocolate ice; as we battle against the air on our way to work or school, feeling it searing, charring skin; during this time of stone-cold toilet seats, the panic before the car\u2019s heating kicks in, a time when a hot coffee is more valuable than a 10-karat diamond, I turn to a film that puts these hardships in perspective: the Coen brothers\u2019 Fargo <\/i>(1996).<\/p>\n

The poor characters in this film put up with a lot\u2014murder, extortion, and kidnapping, to name only a few\u2014and they put up with it all in the middle of the forbidding snow fields of Fargo, North Dakota, a place desolate as the moon, a missed spot on a whiteboard.<\/p>\n

At the same time, these people are some of the most resilient I\u2019ve seen\u2014tough like the hard-packed snow they tromp upon\u2014and it\u2019s that quality that makes Fargo<\/i> so fascinating. The characters aren\u2019t beaten until they\u2019re dead, never giving up\u2014even when they should\u2014because in their world, to give up means to be swallowed whole by the great white beast that\u2019s beneath their feet.<\/p>\n

And yet they\u2019re not Tarantinian characters\u2014they aren\u2019t hardcore; they aren\u2019t masters, really, of anything; they aren\u2019t capable of blasting through a room of people, or fighting tooth-and-bone for sweet revenge; they\u2019re just people, struggling to do the best that they can in their inhospitable world.<\/p>\n

Indeed, each character, snow-beaten, is as fragile as a new layer of ice, with an abundance of weaknesses that serve to humanize them\u2014something crime films often lack. Films like Snatch<\/i> (2000) or the Oceans<\/i> franchise are populated with characters desperate to be badass, and while it may be entertaining to watch Brad Pitt punch out a man twice his size, or to see George Clooney be devilishly clever in his various heisting capabilities, at no point are these characters real\u2014they are caricatures of exciting people\u2014and so it is doubly refreshing to find a film like Fargo<\/i>, one deep-soaked in crime and gangster films, and yet one that possesses the same spontaneity and grit of everyday life (or as we would imagine life in Fargo would be).<\/p>\n

With characters like Marge Gunderson (Francis McDormand)\u2014the hero, the pregnant cop, shrewd and genial\u2014and Carl Showalter (Steve Buscemi)\u2014the loosely unhinged, wild-eyed small-time crook\u2014and Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy)\u2014the skittering, deeply panicked, insecure car salesman, who unwittingly sets the story of hardship and bumbled ideas into motion\u2014Fargo<\/i> sets out to upset the characterization norms that films of its genre fall into, and it does so spectacularly.<\/p>\n

In this respect, Fargo<\/i> is like no other film I\u2019ve seen; it\u2019s determined to subvert inherent tropes, and yet it doesn\u2019t lose any momentum or get tangled and confused by the point it\u2019s trying to make. This is a film with a pure vision, one that the filmmakers are so confident in that it\u2019s translated with ease to viewers.<\/p>\n

So, in these times of short days and pluming breath, I turn to Fargo<\/i> because it reminds me how good I\u2019ve got it. I sit back and admire what a wonderful, well-crafted piece of filmmaking it is while I relish the snow-free ground outside, the fact that I\u2019ve only ever used a wood chipper for wood, and the knowledge that the Minnesotan mob is still in Minnesota. I take comfort in the fact that we are all people struggling to do the best that we can in our own inhospitable worlds.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Fargo 5\/5 As the thermometer scrapes zero and the ground outside crunches in the morning, dirt frozen, mud like chocolate ice; as we battle against the air on our way to work or school, feeling it searing, charring skin; during this time of stone-cold toilet seats, the panic before the car\u2019s heating kicks in, a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13276,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,180],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13275","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-columns","category-january-18-2017"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13275","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13275"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13275\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13277,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13275\/revisions\/13277"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nexusnewspaper.com\/newsite\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}