Fargo (the Coen Brothers)- Isaac Richter

Two of the most peculiar working filmmakers who always do films together have to be Joel and Ethan Coen. The thing that I believe makes them auteurs is the fact that when you see a movie by the Coen Brothers, you know you're watching a movie by the Coen Brothers. Their films are dark. Either a very dark mood and atmosphere (Blood Simple, The Man Who Wasn't There, No Country for Old Men) or outlandishly dark humor (Raising Arizona, The Big Lebowski, Burn After Reading). The film I chose is the most successful combination of both I can think of. Because of the fact that we're addressing film authorship and directors, I'll have to compare this film to other works by the Coens (I've seen every one of their films, except for Intolerable Cruelty and The Ladykillers).
Fargo is actually set in Minneapolis, Minnesotta (though the first scene of the film is set in Fargo, North Dakota), and it's about crooked and dimwitted car salesman Jerry Lundergaard (William H. Macy) who's having money problems and has a wealthy father-in-law, but he can't ask him directly out of pride, so he has a plan. He hires two guys, a quiet giant (Peter Stormare) and his funny-looking, loud-mouthed sidekick (Steve Buscemi) to kidnap his wife and put her up for an $80,000 ransom. The deal is that Jerry gets half that money, but the kidnapping goes wrong. Blood is shed and tracks are left behind, and so Sheriff Margie Gunderson (Frances McDormand) enters the scene and is hot on their tail.
This type of plot is very common for the Coens. They often go for stories about regular people going in way over their heads to come into some money or kill someone or take something they want, and then everything goes wrong. Other examples of this include Raising Arizona, in which an ex-con and his police wife, unable to have a child of their own, steal a baby from a man who has five of them, and it all goes wrong. In Blood Simple, a guy hires a hitman to kill his cheating wife, and that goes wrong. In No Country for Old Men, Llewelyn Moss runs into a drug deal gone wrong and finds a satchel full of money, which he guards with his life as he's chased across the state by someone who wants it. In Fargo, three men trying to come into some simple cash encounter some unexpected complications and are forced to surrender to fate, and Jerry's fate, as much as he wants to avoid it, is that he's going to get caught and arrested. We watch this character dodging calls from unsatisfied customers and trying to lie his way out of situations. He's not a smart man, so you know that sooner or later, the choices that he's made are going to catch up to him. He also made the mistake of trusting people only on the word of one of his excon employees. The Coen Brothers protagonists are usually men who lack some brains and do things wither out of despair or intuition, and as long as they're doing something they shouldn't be doing, they must surrender to the fate set in motion by their choice, which is either Death or imprisonment, and in some cases to simply surrender the object of desire.
Fargo also displays the Coens sense of humor and their colorful characters. A Coen Brothers trademark is to bring humor in the way their characters talk, or in some cases don't talk. In Fargo, the Coens use the Minnesotta accent for humor. Characters have a very peculiar way of saying "Yeah", which sounds more like "Yah", and they have the characters speaking it almost like a symphony. They also use humor in the way the characters are so polite to each other and avoid swearing (ex, Jerry constantly saying "Heck you mean?"). In The Big Lebowski, The Dude is characterized by his hippie speech, and in O Brother Where Art Thou?, George Clooney's character is characterized by his overly literary way of articulating.
Another trademark Coen Brothers character is the guy who won't shut up. In this film, h's played by Steve Buscemi, and in this film he's paired up with another trademark Coen character, and that's the guy who won't talk, played by Peter Stormare. Steve Buscemi also played a character who barely spoke in The Big Lebowski (though in that film, no one ever let him talk) and John Goodman is the character who wouldn't shut up.
In Fargo, there are two Coen regulars who are now almost associated with their names. Frances McDormand (the wife of Joel Coen) has been a regular in their films ever since Blood Simple, their very first film, and she plas a different type of character in every film she appears. In Fargo she's a loveable, optimistic police chief looking to solve a murder and trying to understand why anyone would do the horrible things she's seen (Tommy Lee Jones plays a more pessimistic version of this character in No Country for Old Men). For the Coens, she's already played the target of a hitman, a gym manager looking for plastic surgery, and a nosy, annoying friend to a childless police chief. The other actor is Steve Buscemi. There's a joke surrounding Buscemi's involvement with the Coens, and that is they usually kill him off in the movies he appears, and in every film, his remains become smaller. In this film, his body is put into a woodchipper. In other films, he's face has been burned off, andhe's been creamated after a heart attack.
I believe Fargo to be the Coen Brothers masterpiece, and as soon as you see it, you know this film was done by no one but Joel and Ethan, and like I said, that makes them auteurs. This theme of fate lurking over people who are chasing after something that is out o their hands and the inevitable consequences is ever present in this film. We know from the beginning that after kidnapping a woman, killing a police officer, and killing two people in a tipped-over car, there's no way the ransom is going to go as planned, especially if you keep killing people out of despair (including the father-in-law who is bringing the ransom money, and the guy at the toll booth of the parking lot you're doing the transaction in). Mix all of that with unique characters, carefully written and choreographed dialogue, and character actors who understand what the directors are trying to do, as well as the snowy backdrop of Minneapolis, and you have a Coen Brothers movie. A movie that is a comedy, a ransom movie, a crime drama, a film noir in some respects, a film that mixes so many genres that it's difficult to categorize.