Anniversary of the Fargo
On March 8, 1996, the Coen brothers' black crime comedy "Fargo" was released in limited release in the United States (this also happens). A month later, this comedy thriller, as it is sometimes called, was released widely in the United States and Canada, and a month later it was presented at the Cannes International Film Festival.
In Cannes, "Fargo" received a nomination for the highest award - Palme d'Or. But the jury of the film festival, chaired by Francis Ford Coppola, gave preference to the British film "Secrets & Lies" directed by Mike Leigh. Twenty-one other films shared the fate of a relative loser with "Fargo", including Lars von Trier's "Breaking the Waves". But the films of Trier and the Coen brothers did not remain without awards: the film of Trier was awarded the Grand Prix of the jury, the film of the Coen brothers was awarded the prize for Best Director. True, only one of the brothers received it - Joel.
In early 1997, Fargo received 4 Golden Globe nominations. But the matter did not go beyond the nominations. In one of the most important nominations - Best Comedy or Musical - the Coen brothers' film lost to Alan Parker's musical "Evita". Attention! A FILM IN WHICH IN ALL DETAILS IS SHOWN AT LEAST 6 KILLS AND BLOOD IS FOUNTING IN THE DIRECT SENSE OF THE WORD, IN THE OPINION OF THE HOLLYWOOD FOREIGN PRESS ASSOCIATION IS COMEDY! OR MUSICAL. In the Best Director nomination, Joel Cohen lost to Milos Forman, who directed "The People vs. Larry Flynt". Coen's company was Anthony Minghella, director of "The English Patient".
A little later, the film "Fargo" received 7 Oscar nominations and won two of them. The Oscar for Best Original Screenplay went to the Coen brothers, and the Oscar for Best Lead Actress went to Joel Coen's wife, the wonderful actress Frances McDormand. In the most important nominations - Best Film and Best Director - "Fargo" and Joel Cohen lost, respectively, to "The English Patient" and Anthony Minghella.
In the same 1997 "Fargo" received 6 nominations for the British BAFTA award, but received only one award - the David Lean Award for Best Director. In the Best Film nomination, British film academics, as well as American ones, gave preference to "The English Patient". And another prestigious film award was given to the film of the Coen brothers on the European continent - the Danish Bodil Prize in the nomination for Best American Film. "Fargo" lost the nomination for the French Cesar Award to Lars von Trier's "Breaking the Waves".
Film critics' perception of the film was very mixed. Most critics have given the film quite complimentary reviews. But among the most famous professional critics there were many who spoke very negatively about the film. For example, Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader wrote in his review:
"Coens combine their usual derisive amusement toward their characters with a certain affection and condescending appreciation for some of the local yokels (in particular a pregnant police chief played by Frances McDormand), their well-honed antihumanist vision remains as bleak as ever. This may be a masterpiece of sorts, but it left me feeling rotten."
Dave Kehr of the New York Daily News, in a review entitled "Violent "Fargo" A Brutally Unfunny Satire", wrote:
"From the camera angles to the set design, everything is calculated to make the viewer feel superior to the cloddish, geeky characters on display. Alas, this is something the Coens do with consummate skill."
And the guru of American film critic Roger Ebert devoted two reviews to the film "Fargo", in both he rated the film with a maximum of 4 stars, and included it in his list of "Great Movies". In a review published literally on the first day of the screening of the film, he wrote:
"“Fargo” begins with an absolutely dead-on familiarity with smalltown life in the frigid winter landscape of Minnesota and North Dakota. Then it rotates its story through satire, comedy, suspense and violence, until it emerges as one of the best films I've ever seen."
The famous Russian film critic Sergei Kudryavtsev, who rated the Coen brothers' films with a rather modest 6 points on a 10-point system, in his review, as it were, brings together and unites extreme judgments:
"Fargo.".. as art-correct as possible, deliberately sustained not only to the final frame..., but also to the very last title in the aesthetics of "simple cinema", in the spirit of the early artless film primitives of the other two brothers-Lumiere. ... at the same time, it resembles the pathetic dramatizations of real cases in the American TV show "Rescue Phone 911", and some ordinary Soviet detective about the "everyday life of criminal investigation" somewhere in the Siberian taiga."
Of course, every moviegoer has every right to form their own opinion about this film, its advantages and disadvantages. We would like to draw attention to one feature of the film, which, probably, not everyone notices. This is especially true for those who do not really like to read the film credits or do not have the patience to watch the final credits to the end. Well. The movie starts with the following notification:
"It's a true story. The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors, the names were changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest was said exactly as it happened."
This notice gave rise to the belief in many Minnesotans that the story in the film was inspired by one T. Eugene Thompson, a St. Paul lawyer who was convicted of hiring a man to kill his wife in 1963 near Coen's hometown City St. Louis Park. However, the Coens have always maintained that they had never heard of Thompson.
This denial of the Cohens ' use of the story of T. Eugene Thompson as a starting point for the creation of the script for the film "Fargo" prompted a well-known Internet resource snopes.com, positioning itself as "a reliable source on the Internet for determining what is true and what is complete nonsense", to conduct its own investigation, the result of which was the assumption that
"The closest Fargo comes to being a “true story” is that one might fairly say it was “inspired by” some real-life incidents, primarily the disappearance of Helle Crafts, a Danish flight attendant, from her home in Newtown, Connecticut, in 1986. Helle’s husband, Richard (against whom she had begun divorce proceedings), was eventually arrested, tried, and convicted of her murder: Police theorized that Richard Crafts had struck his wife unconscious in their bedroom with a blunt object, then placed her body in freezer; he later removed her body from the freezer, chopped it up with a chainsaw, put the pieces through a woodchipper, and scattered the remains in and around a nearby river."
But now let's remember that in the very last of the final credits of the film, which not everyone dares to see, it says:
"The persons and events portrayed in this production are fictitious. No similarity to actual persons, living or dead, is intended or should be inferred."
And for a quarter of a century, the famous jokers and hoaxers the Coen brothers have not given a direct answer to the question of whether the characters and events of "Fargo" have real prototypes and analogues or are completely a figment of the brothers' imagination.
Whatever it was, viewers around the world quite highly appreciated the creation of the Coen brothers. This is evidenced by both the financial performance of the film, and the ratings issued by users of IMDB and Kinopoisk. With a budget of $ 7 million, the film worldwide collected more than $ 60 million, i.e., almost 9 times more than it was worth. Tellingly, in the US, the film collected only 40% of this amount, the rest - outside of America. As for the audience ratings, 71% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users around the world gave the film a rating from 8 to 10.
With that said, the rating of the film "Fargo" by the Coen brothers according to FilmGourmand is 9.184, making it the 126th Rank in the Golden Thousand.
