Fargo Review

The Coens shoot Minnesota as a white void with occasional buildings, and Roger Deakins frames that flat horizon so consistently that a body in the snow or a car on an empty road becomes a graphic event. The emptiness is the comedy and the dread at once. William H. Macy's Jerry Lundegaard is one of the great portraits of middling desperation, a man whose scheme fails at every stage because he is not competent enough to be a criminal or brave enough to be honest, and the ice-scraper tantrum in the parking lot tells you everything about him.

Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare are a perfect mismatch of chatter and silence. The dialect writing is the signature, all soft vowels and passive-aggressive Midwestern politeness, and it stays funny without turning the characters into targets. Frances McDormand does not appear for over half an hour and then immediately reorganizes the film, since Marge is smart, unbothered and morally centered, and her closing speech in the cruiser is the only sincere thing anybody says. Compact, mean and humane at once.