My Favorite Scene: Fargo

Fargo, that very perfect, very fictional masterpiece by Joel and Ethan Coen, is filled with moments that don’t matter. At first glance, half of the content that the Coen’s elect to feature in their 98-minute film have nothing to do with anything. Take, for instance, the remarkably awkward extended lunch between Mike Yanagita and Marge Gunderson. As the two high school pals chat it up in a dumpy restaurant, it becomes very clear very quickly that Mike is obsessed with Marge to the point of delusion. Their lunch ends, and although the scene is referenced one other time, it did nothing whatsoever to propel the film’s plot.

Neither does Carl Showalter and Gaear Grimsrud having sex with prostitutes in a dive motel (followed, naturally, by a post-coital viewing of The Tonight Show). What these scenes do, however, is set an unprecedented level of character development that many filmmakers deem too insignificant to highlight.  When you go back and rewatch Fargo (and really, there’s never a bad time to go back and rewatch Fargo), keep track of how long Frances McDormand is in the film. I’d venture a guess that McDormand’s total amount of screentime ranks lowest among all of the actresses who have won the Best Actress Oscar.  I mention this because, despite the fact that she really isn’t in the movie much, we know everything there is to know about Marge Gunderson.

That was an incredibly long-winded, ass-backwards way of backing into the scene I want to highlight, but I feel it is important to make mention of an aspect that’s often overlooked when discussing the film. Fargo is a great movie, and its many, brief interludes of character development are what make it that.

Which is probably why, in a film filled with endless amounts of pathetic desperation, I’m drawn to the moment that defines idiotic hopelessness in a way I’ve never seen a movie encapsulate.

The deal was simple: Carl (Steve Buscemi) and Gaear (Peter Stormare) were hired by Jerry (William H. Macy), to kidnap Jerry’s wife, Jean, so that Jerry could collect the ransom money from his father-in-law, Wade, a rich asshole who detests Jerry.  When it’s finally time to swap Jean for the dough, Wade shows up at the meet instead of Jerry, which infuriates Carl to no end. Within minutes, half of Carl’s face has been blown off and Wade lays dead on the top floor of a parking garage.

The next time we see Carl, he’s pulled over on the side of the road, changing the “dressing” on his wound. And then he sees it. He opens the suitcase and sees that the $80,000 he was supposed to collect is $920,000 more than he anticipated. He takes out $80,000, sets it aside, and gets out of his car, case in hand.

He walks over to a fence line a few yards away, gets down on his knees and begins digging a hole in the snow with a tiny, red ice scrapper. Once the hole is dug, he places the loot in the ground and begins covering it with snow. Once buried, we’re privy to film’s best, most comical moment. Buscemi, in a fantastic bit of emotional expression, looks down the fence line: snow and fence. He turns his head and looks the other way: snow and fence. It’s all the same, for miles on end. He slams the red scrapper into the snow to mark where the loot is, stands up, studies his work, and walks away.

As Carl works his way back to his car, the film ingeniously cuts to a wide shot framing the red scrapper on the right, the car on the left, Buscemi in the middle, and a whole lot of nothing everywhere else. And all’s we can do is sit back and laugh. It isn’t currently snowing, but seriously, how long will it take for wind and/or snow to hide that ice scrapper? And when you consider how needlessly hostile Carl is to the psychotic Gaear minutes later, we can’t help but wonder exactly how Carl made it this far in his life.

This scene, as you may know, was made famous after the media went batshit crazy when Takako Konishi was found dead in the snow near Fargo in 2001. Media outlets reported that Konishi apparently made the trip from Japan to find the buried money depicted in the film, which was ultimately wildly inaccurate. At any rate, Fargo is (by far) one of the funniest movies I’ve ever seen, for scenes precisely like this one.

It’s best to summarize the scene in Carl’s own words. Upon discovering how much money he’s really in possession of, Carl, through his half-mangled face, quietly blurts, “Jeshsush Sshrist.  Jeshsush fucskem Sshrist.”

Couldn’t have said it better myself.