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If the Coen Brothers have seemed precocious (as many critics have judged them), it may be a result of the flamboyance and skewed reality that is so much a part of their work. Fargo seems as much a response to this accusation as it does anything, but as a response, it goes so far to the other end of the spectrum that it becomes flamboyantly un-flamboyant. Let me explain: Fargo claims to be a true story and maybe it even is a true story even if it didn't start out as one. The movie plays out as if the phrase "based on a true story" is the premise they started from when they sat down to write it. Then they set out to make it in a weird mock cinema verite style. Maybe they're onto something here.

The audience doesn't know what is going to happen next in Fargo, not because the plot is particularly labyrinthine, but because it is exactly like real life. Small time car dealer William Macy has his wife kidnapped so he can extort a ransom from his rich father-in-law and cover spiraling financial misconduct at the car dealership where he works. From there, things just swing out of control and Macy's character slips further and further into paranoia. Macy's opposite number is Fran McDormand's very pregnant sherrif who is the center of the movie. She gently but implacably penetrates to the heart of events with plain good sense. The striking thing about Fargo is the way in which it takes these events and puts them into a world and a context which is recognizably the world I see when I step outside every day. There is an actual vision of America here, not (as is the case in virtually every movie made in the last twenty years) some funhouse America which serves as a soundstage for the movie. Fargo takes this vision and sets its events against it and in the process transforms both the vision and the events into a view of the human condition that is both brutal and humane, Apollonian and Dionysian, order and chaos all at the same time. There is nothing else in movies quite like it.