Awake in the Dark: The Best of Roger Ebert (38 page)

MARCH 8, 1996

Fargo begins with an absolutely dead-on familiarity with small-town 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 seen. To watch it is to experience steadily mounting delight, as you realize the filmmakers have taken enormous risks, gotten away with them, and made a movie that is completely original, and as familiar as an old shoe-or a rubber-soled hunting boot from L.L. Bean, more likely.

The film is "based on a true story" that took place in Minnesota in 1987.*
It has been filmed on location, there and in North Dakota, by the Coen brothers, Ethan and Joel, who grew up in St. Louis Park, a suburb of Minneapolis, and went on to make good movies like Blood Simple, Miller's Crossing, and Barton Fink, but never before a film as wonderful as this one, shot in their own backyard.

To describe the plot is to risk spoiling its surprises. I will tread carefully. A car salesman named Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) desperately needs money for a business deal-a parking lot scheme that can save him from bankruptcy. He is under the thumb of his rich father-in-law (Harve Presnell), who owns the car agency, and treats him like a loser. Jerry hires a couple of scrawny lowlifes named Showalter and Grimsrud (Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare) to kidnap his wife (Kristin Rudriid), and promises to split an $8o,ooo ransom with them. Simple enough, except that everything goes wrong in completely unanticipated ways, as the plot twists and turns and makes a mockery of all of Jerry's best thinking.

Showalter is nervous, sweaty, talkative, mousy. Grimsrud is a sullen slug of few words. During the course of the kidnaping, he unexpectedly kills some people ("Oh, Daddy!" says Showalter, terrified). The bodies are found the next morning, frozen beside the highway, in the barren lands between Minneapolis and Brainerd , North Dakota, which is, as we are reminded every time we see the hulking statue outside town, the home of Paul Bunyan.

Brainerd's police chief is a pregnant woman named Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand). She talks like one of the McKenzie Brothers, in a Canadian American Scandinavian accent that's strong on cheerful folksiness. Everybody in the movie talks like that, with lines like "You're dern tootin'." When she gets to the big city, she starts looking for a place with a good buffet. Marge Gunderson needs a jump to get her patrol car started in the morning. But she is a gifted cop, and soon after visiting the murder site, she reconstructs the crime-correctly. Eyewitnesses place two suspects in a brown Sierra. She traces it back to Jerry Lundegaard's lot. "I'm a police officer from up Brainerd," she tells him, "investigating some malfeasance."

Jerry, brilliantly played by Macy, is a man weighed down by the insoluble complexities of the situation he has fumbled himself into. He is so incompetent at crime that, when the kidnaping becomes unnecessary, he can't call off the kidnapers, because he doesn't know their phone number. He's being pestered with persistent calls from GMAC, inquiring about the illegible serial number on the paperwork for the same missing brown Sierra. He tries sending faxes in which the number is smudged. GMAC isn't fooled. Macy creates the unbearable agony of a man who needs to think fast, and whose brain is scrambled with fear, guilt, and the crazy illusion that he can somehow still pull this thing off.

Fargo is filled with dozens of small moments that make us nod with recognition. When the two low-rent hoods stop for the night at a truck stop, for example, they hire hookers. Cut to a shot of bored mercenary sex. Cut to the next shot: they're all sitting up in bed, watching the Tonight Show on TV. William H. Macy, who has played salesmen and con men before (he's a veteran of David Mamet's plays), finds just the right note in his scenes in the auto showroom. It's fascinating to watch him in action, trying to worm out of a lie involving an extra charge for rust-proofing.

Small roles seem bigger because they're so well written and observed. Kristin Rudriid has few scenes as Jerry's wife, but creates a character out of them, always chopping or stirring something furiously in the kitchen. Their teenage son, who excuses himself from the table to go to McDonald's, helps establish the milieu of the film with a bedroom that has a poster on its wall for the Accordion King. Marge, discussing a hypothetical killer who has littered the highway with bodies, observes matter-of-factly, "I doubt he's from Brainerd." Harve Presnell is a typical self-made millionaire in his insistence on delivering the ransom money himself: he earned it, and by God if anyone is going to hand it over, it'll be him. He wants his money's worth. And on the way to the violent and unexpected climax, Marge has a drink in her hotel buffet with an old high school chum who obviously still lusts after her, even though she's married and pregnant. He explains, in a statement filled with the wistfulness of the down sizable, "I'm working for Honeywell. If you're an engineer, you could do a lot worse."

Frances McDormand has a lock on an Academy Award nomination with this performance, which is true in every individual moment, and yet slyly, quietly, over the top in its cumulative effect. The screenplay is by Ethan and Joel Coen (Joel directed, Ethan produced), and although I have no doubt that events something like this really did take place in Minnesota in 1987, they have elevated reality into a human comedy-into the kind of movie that makes us hug ourselves with the way it pulls off one improbable scene after another. Films like Fargo are why I love the movies.

NOVEMBER 7, 1997

Memory is a selection of images, some elusive, others printed indelibly on the brain. The summer I killed my father, I was Io years old.

With those opening words, Eve's Bayou coils back into the past, into the memories of a child who grew up in a family both gifted and flawed, and tried to find her own way to the truth. The words explain the method of the film. This will not be a simpleminded story that breathlessly races from A to B. It is a selection of memories, filtered through the eyes of a young girl who doesn't understand everything she sees-and filtered, too, through the eyes of her older sister, and through the eyes of an aunt who can foretell everyone's future except for her own.

As these images unfold, we are drawn into the same process Eve has gone through: we, too, are trying to understand what happened in that summer of 1962, when Eve's handsome, dashing father-a doctor and womanizer-took one chance too many. And we want to understand what happened late one night between the father and Eve's older sister, in a moment that was over before it began. We want to know because the film makes it perfectly possible that there is more than one explanation; Eve's Bayou studies the way that dangerous emotions can build up until something happens that no one is responsible for and that can never be taken back.

All of these moments unfold in a film of astonishing maturity and confidence; Eve's Bayou, one of the very best films of the year, is the debut of its writer and director, Kasi Lemmons. She sets her story in southern Gothic country, in the bayous and old Louisiana traditions that Tennessee Williams might have been familiar with, but in tone and style she earns comparison with the family dramas of Ingmar Bergman. That Lemmons can make a film this good on the first try is like a rebuke to established filmmakers.

The story is told through the eyes of Eve Batiste, played with fierce truthfulness by Jurnee Smollett. Her family is descended from a slave, also named Eve, who saved her master's life and was rewarded with her freedom and with sixteen children. In 1962, the Batistes are the premiere family in their district, living in a big old mansion surrounded by rivers and swampland. Eve's father Louis (Samuel L. Jackson) is the local doctor. Her mother Roz (Lynn Whitfield) is "the most beautiful woman I ever have seen." Her sister Cisely (Meagan Good) is on the brink of adolescence, and the apple of her father's eye; Eve watches unhappily at a party, and afterward asks her father, "Daddy, why don't you ever dance with me?" Living with them is an aunt, Mozelle (Debbi Morgan), who has lost three husbands, is not unfamiliar with the inside of a mental hospital," and has the gift of telling fortunes.

Dr. Batiste is often away from home on house calls-some of them legitimate, some excuses for his philandering. He is a weak but not a bad man, and not lacking in insight: "To a certain type of woman, I am a hero," he says. "I need to be a hero." On the night that her father did not dance with her, Eve steals away to a barn and falls asleep, only to awaken and see her father apparently making love with another man's wife. Eve tells Cisely, who says she was mistaken, and the doubt over this incident will echo later, on another night when much depends on whether Cisely was mistaken.

Lemmons surrounds her characters with a rich setting. There is a marketplace, dominated by the stalls of farmers and fisherman, and by the presence of a voodoo woman (Diahann Carroll) whose magic may or may not be real. Certainly Aunt Mozelle's gift is real; her prophecies have a terrifying accuracy, as when she tells a woman her missing son will be found in a Detroit hospital on Tuesday. But Mozelle cannot foresee her own life: "I looked at each of my husbands," she says, "and never saw a thing." All three died. So when a handsome painter (Vondie Curtis-Hall) comes into the neighborhood and Mozelle knows she has found true love at last, she is afraid to marry him, because it has been prophesied that any man who marries her will die.

The film has been photographed by Amy Vincent in shadows and rich textures, where even a sunny day contains dark undertones; surely she looked at the Bergman films photographed by Sven Nykvist in preparing her approach. There is a scene of pure magic as Mozelle tells Eve the story of the death of one of her husbands, who was shot by her lover; the woman and the girl stand before a mirror, regarding the scene from the past, and then Mozelle slips out of the shot and reappears in the past.

There is also great visual precision in the scenes involving the confused night when the doctor comes home drunk, and Cisely goes downstairs to comfort him. What happened? We get two accounts and we see two versions, and the film is far too complex and thoughtful to try to reduce the episode to a simple formula like sexual abuse; what happens lasts only a second, and is charged with many possibilities of misinterpretation, all of them prepared for by what has gone before.

Eve's Bayou resonates in the memory. It called me back for a second and third viewing. If it is not nominated for Academy Awards, then the Academy is not paying attention. For the viewer, it is a reminder that sometimes films can venture into the realms of poetry and dreams.