and I just want to know one thing. Could they have possibly used a more annoying accent? By the end of the movie, I was hoping everyone would die, including the unborn baby who would eventually talk like that. Please tell me that was the film maker’s intent. Steve Buscemi was the only saving grace of the film. Sure he talks a little weird, too, but no way was it as annoying as the rest of those folks. Sorry if I offended anyone who actually talks like that, but c’mon. You’ve gotta be kidding me!
:times thread to see how fast it goes to the Pit:
My gg-grandfather first settled near Whalen. The closest town of note to Whalen is Brainerd, where most of the story takes place. (Hardly any of the movie takes place in Fargo.)
In short: It’s not an accent. That’s the way normal people (a lot of my relatives) speak. The rest of you have accents, you betcha!
And what was with all that snow? BORING! Couldn’t they have moved it to some place more interesting? Like Los Angeles, or Miami?
It actually wasn’t the accent, so much as the "well"s, "yeah"s, and "hey"s they constantly repeated.
Isn’t this the most superficial reason possible to not like the movie ?
One of the things I love most about the Coen Brothers is the accents they use in their movies. Every one is distinct and wonderful. Hi’s So’Western twang in Raising Arizona, the folksy Swedish cadence of Marge Gunderson, the burned out West Coast hippie stammer of The Dude. It’s all good, man, it’s all good. Tom Hanks cracked-out Col. Sanders accent in The Ladykillers alone was worth the price of admission.
Excellent diction and pronunciation are hallmarks of New Jersey speakers.
Oh, and they have NO idiosyncratic elements to their speech either.
I’m kind of being sarcastic about “the only saving grace of the movie.” It wasn’t bad, just extremely annoying. Is it any more superficial than someone not liking a movie because of tons of cursing?
I grew up in Fargo and left when I was 21. While I didn’t leave with the accent that they used in the movie, I CAN tell you that that a lot of the people in that part of the country(especially the countrysides of northern Minnesota and North Dakota do talk an awful lot like that. In fact, every time I go home to visit my family I come back with the accent that I grew up with. It’s not quite as strong and it withers over time but it gives my friends quite a bit of joy to give me crap about. It’s a scandinavian accent…and it truly does exist.
Oh, and most of that movie was set in Minnesota. The word soda is a pretty good test of someone who grew up in that area. The ‘o’ will sound like the ‘o’ in boat. It’s quite drawn out. I get more crap saying the word ‘soda’ than any word in the dictionary. 
-K
Well, it’s probably the same amount of crap some of my friends get here over saying “water” and “dog”.
My grandfather talked like that. We city folk don’t. But it is pretty funny because its really only slightly exaggerated.
Yep, that’s true! Also…you have to throw a few “eh’s” in just like the movie “The Great White North” with Bob and Doug McKenzie. (sp)
We use a LOT of eh’s and uffda’s.
-K
Eh, I knew a guy who was absolutely furious when the movie ended because we never found out why Jerry Lundegaard needed the money. Absolutely furious.
You mean he wasn’t paying attention?
Jerry had been pulling scams at the dealership so he’d have the money to keep his family to a standard of living he hoped his hateful father in law would approve of.
The car company was catching him on one of his scams and he was trying to get money to cover it.
A friend from Minnesota swears he called his mom back home and said “Mom, you gotta see ‘Fargo’”–she called back to say she liked the film, but “Why did they all talk like they’re from Wisconsin?”
Along with with, I thought he was also trying to get the money for that lot deal he had discovered. Remeber the one he had introduced to his father in-law?
Okay. I wasn’t sure.
My feelings…
It’s an alright movie, but never really got what was so great about it. It had some good scenes, and I’m a steve Busciemi fan(and to this day, I think of him as being “funny looking”) but it’s nowhere near the top of my list of Coen Bros films. I actually felt *Barton Fink * was a more interesting movie, even if it was extremely slow.
I know I’m going get it for that.
Here in the Upper Mississippi River Valley you can tell where people are from by the way they pronounce the name of their home state, don’t c’ha know.
Minneesooootah
I-wah
Ill-noy
Whis-can-sin
When you run into a guy who grew up in a family where the grandparents spoke German, or Norwegian or Swedish or Czech things get really exciting, then.
What part of Joisey is our friend, the guy with an intolerance for regional accents, from, then?
I actually don’t say Joiysey. My northern Jersey friends say that. And it’s my southern Jersey friends who say “wudder” instead of “water”. Us central Jerseyans are about as normal as can be.