It's heresy, I suppose, to report that the much-celebrated FX series Fargo, produced by Joel and Ethan Coen in the spirit of their famous film of the same title, is more than a little tedious. Indeed, I have never managed to sit through an entire episode without briefly falling asleep. Perhaps my somnolence is an artifact of mismanaged blood sugar, or the dull and repetitive commercials that interrupt the action, or the fact that the program airs at 9:00 pm and doesn't ever exactly end on time -- the show usually concludes around 10:10 or 10:15. But I don't think so -- the show is leisurely paced and extremely repetitive: the same thing tends to happen over and over again. Although Fargo is very handsomely produced and beautifully acted, the series is simply too long for its rather simple-minded subject matter. Furthermore, unlike Twin Peaks, the obvious precursor to this series, the show labors mightily to remain rooted in something like plausible Midwestern verisimilitude -- during the six or so episodes that I have seen the show never drifts into the kind of febrile, hallucinatory and sex-drenched delirium that characterized David Lynch's foray into TV-land. In fact, the show's annoying assertion that it dramatizes a real story and the fact that the program features Minnesota accents that are exaggerated, but, nonetheless, recognizable, as well as the Minnesota folkways more or less realistically displayed and the peppering of the script with the names of local cities and villages -- people talk about going to Mankato and Sleepy Eye and the action takes place in Rock County at the county seat of Luverne -- all of these gestures toward an operatic verismo induce in the viewer the sense that the show's story should be, at least, quasi-realistic. And it is on this count that the program fails most dramatically: by the sixth episode, the program's body-count had risen to proportions roughly equivalent to Minnesota's losses in World War One. The amount of carnage, and the characters' blithely casual response, to heaps of corpses -- each show features about eight graphically staged killings -- finally induces in the viewer not only a willful refusal to suspend disbelief, but, in my case, slumber. I generally fall asleep at the beginning of the last third of the show, catnapping for about four or five minutes until aroused from my sleep by the screams of yet another murder victim or another protracted fusillade of gunfire.
The show's plot involves an ancient formula -- combat between two ruthless crime families, a conflict in which a variety of innocents find themselves entangled. This plot works well for a three or, even, four hour movie -- the Godfather pictures are a noteworthy example -- but can't be sustained over six hours or more. The first episode, so far much the best, was wonderful and induced in me a sort of euphoria -- this show was going to be something unprecedented on Tv, something radically new and brilliant. The program is exquisitely shot, although not in Minnesota but in Alberta, Canada, where, I suppose, snowfall is more predictable. The show is edited into a slow-moving, but forceful combination of close-ups showing evil, snarling villains and bemused innocents intercut with carefully composed long shots showing confrontations against the vast snowy horizons of the plains of Alberta. The small town simulating Luverne, Minnesota looks nothing like that place, but, effectively, represents the small cities on the prairie, places like Pipestone and Jasper, Minnesota -- it is pleasing to see these elegant little villages with their classical architecture portrayed on screen. The acting by people like Kirsten Dunst and Ted Danson is appropriately faux naïf -- everyone channels Frances McDormand's great performance in the Coen brother's movie although without that film's sense of the immense and pathetic wastefulness of violent crime. The shoot-outs are staged with fierce and balletic precision and the violence is filmed so as to contrast the ugliness and folly of human beings against the indifference and natural beauty of the snowy northern landscapes. The film preserves much of the quirky perspective of the Coen brothers and the musical cues are uniformly brilliant and moving. My criticism of the program is that, although there is a lot going on, it is all macabre stuff of the same sort. The opening episode, before aspects of the show went stale, was, possibly, the best television ever filmed, but the show couldn't sustain that level of excellence. A dour, Gothic family of thugs named Gerhardt lives in the snowy wasteland near Fargo -- these gangsters are led by a fearsome matriarch in default of their Godfather's disability (the man is catatonic due to a cerebral hemorrhage); the Gerhardt's have a family history dating to the Weimar Republic and their most terrifying factotum is soft-spoken Indian with long black hair and a menacing immobile face. Rival mobsters from Kansas City threaten to muscle into their territory. Various Baroque threats are exchanged and war is threatened. At the outset of the show, one of the Gerhardt boys travels to a Waffle Hut near Luverne in an attempt to intimidate a female judge from Fargo -- we never really know what motivates him, but he is clearly doing the family's business. The Judge is as ferocious as the matriarch who commands the Gerhardt family and, after the obligatory colloquy of bellicose and poetic insults, the young man shoots the woman and everyone else in the place as well. As he is fleeing the scene of the bloodbath, a hairdresser hits him with her car; the thug finds himself bleeding to death and inserted through the left front of her windshield. The hairdresser, played by the nubile Kirsten Dunst, is an example of "Minnesota Nice" gone berserk. She transports the dying bad guy to her garage and, since her husband is a butcher... well, you can imagine the rest. Like the other women in the program, Dunst's character acts in a completely conventional way, speaks in platitudes, and looks like she has just come from a potluck at the Lutheran Church -- but she is completely amoral, implacable, and relentlessly ruthless. In this respect, she is similar to the paralyzed crime boss' granddaughter -- she lures a number of men to their death while sleeping with the Black gunman dispatched from KC to slaughter the members of her family. This girl is sufficiently savage to betray her family by calling in a bloody raid designed to kill her own father. (The girl is also sexually adventurous -- after one tryst with her lover, the Black mobster says: "You surprised me with that thing with your finger." "I thought you'd like that," the girl says. "I didn't say I liked having your finger stuck up my ass. I said you surprised me." To which the girl blithely replies: "It wasn't my finger. It was my thumb.") The problem with this is that each week is, more or less, the same; nothing really develops and there is the sense of starting back at zero each episode -- imprecations are hurled this way and that, the good folks struggle to understand the ever-increasing heap of corpses piling up, the local eccentrics act eccentrically, a character introduced about two episodes before gets rubbed-out (this is supposed to surprise the viewer) and more of the army of extras have their heads blown-off. There are some arcane aspects to the enterprise -- Ronald Reagan played with damning precision by Bruce Campbell is campaigning at Sioux Falls in South Dakota (the casting of Campbell best known as Ash in The Evil Dead films is an excellent joke in itself) and, from time to time, people see what may be UFOs -- the latter detail seems a homage to the Coen's highly idiosyncratic film The Man Who Wasn't There, a 2001 picture that also featured as a deux ex machina some flying saucers. These elements of the show, which are the most interesting parts of Fargo, are not well-developed and, at this writing, I can't tell where this part of the plot is headed. Fargo is excellent, but because it is produced by the Coen brothers and invokes a film masterpiece, must be judged by the highest esthetic criteria -- and, by those criteria, I can't quite deem the show to be a success.
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