Wait! How Did I Miss This? Fargo (1996)

    Hey everyone and welcome back to Silver Screen Spectacle. We’re back with another edition of Wait! How Did I Miss This? with the 1996 dark comedy classic Fargo. As always, this article will contain spoilers. So my knowledge of this movie was fairly minimal going into it. I knew it involved a wood chipper since it’s the most iconic part of this film that’s about it. The Coen brothers direct this movie and while I know their reputation, I’m not too familiar with most of their work. So what did I think of Fargo?

    This was so much different from what I was expecting, but not necessarily in a bad way. Let’s start with the acting. Everyone does a phenomenal job here. William H. Macy plays despicable really well. Ten minutes into the film I hated his character, but I realized quickly that I got the movie’s intended reaction. Frances McDormand does a magnificent job. She really nailed the mix of dramatic and comedic timing. Steve Buscemi is a lot of fun as one of the film’s villains. My favorite actor though was Peter Stormare. He does not speak much but some of his facial acting, especially at the end was the highlight of the entire film for me.

    The Coen brothers wrote, directed, and edited this movie. From a direction standpoint, the film is fantastic, it has an incredibly unique feel immediately. The script as good as it is threw me off a bit. There are a couple parts like McDormand going to lunch with an old friend that felt completely random and left me wondering if I missed something. Also, I know it’s part of the humor, but the constant repetitive use of people saying a variation of oh yeah was incredibly grating. Those issues aside, I thought the story was intriguing, the humor mostly worked, and I felt how the film wanted me to about its characters. The editing also threw me for a loop, I liked it overall but there felt like things were missing. Everything else gets done so well, though this may be intentional and I’m just missing something. 

    Roger Deakins cinematography is beautiful. Especially in nighttime sequences, I adored how this movie got shot. The musical score by Carter Burwell was also strong. It felt like it helped build a lot of the atmosphere of the film. At a shockingly brief 98 minutes, the pacing of the film is insanely fast. However, when it ended, I thought we still had another half hour to go. There felt like there were major things unresolved. If I missed something obvious or you have an explanation for these things, I’d love to hear them in the comments below.

    So overall I thought Fargo was a brilliant film, especially from an acting perspective. However, some other aspects had issues for me that prevented me from straight-up loving this film. So that’s it for this episode of Wait! How Did I Miss This?. I hope you all enjoyed it if you liked the article, maybe give it a share. This series will return next Wednesday, but I’ll be back tomorrow with another edition of Flashback: MCU Edition. We’re gonna be starting Phase Two with Iron Man 3. See you all tomorrow.