To me the best thing about the movie is how William H. Macy’s character is destroying his own life, ruining his family, completely at his wit’s end, tangled up with criminals, in the middle of a fraudulent scheme, and utterly overstressed, and yet he still can’t ever bring himself to swear. “Ah, HECK!”
And that all the mayhem and murder that happens in the film is ultimately over a parking lot.
We never really know why Jerry needs all that money, but the parking lot is probably not it.
What we do know is that he’s been ripping off GMAC using a scam that actually did take place back then, where people would get money from GMAC for nonexistent cars. (This was, in fact, an epidemic problem for awhile until stomped out at around the time the movie is set.) We don’t know how much he’s in for but Reilly Deifenbach (the guy who keeps calling) wants $320,000, so it’s at least that much.
When Jerry mistakenly thinks that his father in law’s going to give him the $750,000 for the parking lot, he tries to call off Showalter and Grimsrud from the kidnapping. If he just wants the parking lot, he wouldn’t be asking for $750,000 in cash; he’d have been planning to arrange a loan in the first place, and in any event GMAC is his real problem, as they’re nipping at his heels. And in any event, if he runs a $1 million scam from his father and law and is suddenly in possession of a $750,000 property, well, even Jerry Lundegaard knows that’s going to get him caught. Scheme A was the parking lot, Scheme B was the kidnapping. He went to the kidnapping when he figured Wade wasn’t biting on the parking lot; it’s apparent during the scene at Jerry’s house that he’s been asking Wade about the lot deal for a long time. When, to his surprise, Scheme A might actually work, he tried cancelling Scheme B.
What makes it confusing (aside from the fact that they don’t really explain the GMAC scam; it helps if you know about how that sort of thing happened) is that the numbers don’t match up. Jerry tried to scam $1 million in the kidnapping, offering the kidnappers just $40,000 and a car; he tried to get $750,000 in the lot scheme, and he’d embezzled at least $320,000 that GMAC knows about. I think;
One time I watched this movie with a guy who flipped out at the end because he’d been waiting with bated breath to find out why Jerry needed the money. I tried to explain to him that it didn’t matter why he needed the money, it was just important that he needed it and was desperate enough to set this all in motion to get it.
Oh God - Reilly Diefenbach, one of the all-time greatest unseen characters of film. The scenes where Jerry talks to him on the phone just make you cringe.
HEY!! I was bangin’ that chick!
Whenever somebody suggests a restaurant I have a hard time not to say “Is it reasonable?”
So how many died in this flick?
My count:
-The State Trooper and the two witnesses on the highway
-Mrs. Lundegaard at the cabin on the lake
-Wade on top of the parking garage
-The parking garage attendant
-Carl Schowalter in the chipper
That’s seven. Missing any?
I’m not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your police work, there, Lou.
They never said whether Mrs. L died at the cabin. I think she did, and I think your body count is right, but I mainly wanted to be able to say
I’m not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your police work, there, Lou.
Also, I’d like to salute the polka king (?) poster in Scotty’s room.
I’m guessing Jerry had a problem with either gambling or hookers and blow.
He seemed like a decent husband to his wife Jean, and they lived in a fairly modest house considering
Jean’s families resources.
He had her kidnapped by a couple of goons - not decent husband behaviour.
“I’ll fix ya some eggs” <== that was a better husband.
This is my favorite quote, but it’s really all in the delivery.
I love this scene as well, really great stuff. I also made me fall in love with Marge Gunderson. She’s a terrific woman, a wife any man would be lucky to have.
Wade is definitely my favorite character in the film. His passive-aggressive manner, stubbornness, and weird accent make him very memorable. It’s amazing how handsome Harve Presnell used to be when he was younger. Once upon a time, he was a song-and-dance musical actor of the 50s and early 60s; then he acted very sporadically for the next few decades before making a major comeback with Fargo. He’s had 51 roles since Fargo, and only had 12 credits before that! A very rare example of someone having his breakout role very late in life.
Ever since the first time I saw Fargo, I have always wanted this tracksuit that Presnell wears at the dinner table scene.
Nitpick: Coen Brothers, not Cohen.
I once heard Garrison Keillor complain that Fargo makes Minnesotans look “dumber than brook trout.” And on reflection, I guess it does. Jerry Lundegaard has committed a white-collar crime so ineptly that he can’t cover his tracks (he can’t just give the money back, apparently it’s gone, but what he did with it is never explained; he doesn’t seem to have a mistress or a drug habit or a gambling problem; apparently he’s just incompetent at everything, including handling money) . . . he tries to fix it by arranging his wife’s kidnapping and he gives the hired thugs partial payment in the form of a car that can be traced back to him . . . even the professional crooks, from out-of-state apparently, act like they were required to check their brains at the state line. The only halfway smart character in the whole movie is Marge – and she chases down a murderer while she’s seven or eight months pregnant; how smart is that?!
I think part of Carl Showalter’s character is that he hates Minnesota and everything in it. He hates the cold weather, he hates having to deal with the polite and overly-cheerful people; I think right before he shoots Wade, he says something like “what the fuck is the matter with you people?!” which I took to mean the Minnesotans; everything about Carl is pretty much the opposite of the Minnesotan archetype. He looks like some kind of sleazy hipster from New York.
I can think of only one other movie in which a major, pregnant character is a lust-object (to males other than the baby-daddy): The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
Nah, folks up there just talk like that. I was visiting a customer in Mankato. It’s by Le Sueur (pronounced “Leh Sewer”–go Bearss!) and the receptionist sounded just like the hookers. Nah, even worse. As a Minnesotan around this time I usually toss in my standard “joke,” “It was the first movie I saw where the people didn’t talk funny.”
Note that Hooker #2 was played by Melissa Peterman, “Barbara Jean” (AKA: The Funny One) on Reba. I wasn’t surprised she’s Minneapolis, born and bred.
Oh, and the sibilant concluding S is a bitch to lose. Ask Sarah Palin.
The bark beetle carries the worm to its nest, where it will feed its young for up to six months.
I got the impression that he wasn’t trying at all – he talked like that just because he grew up there. Pretty much how it works in real life – which somehow made it all the weirder/funnier to hear that accent coming out of an Asian’s mouth. But I didn’t get any feeling he wasn’t accepted.
Or because he was delusional; that was left ambiguous.
My father was once the head lawyer at a large corporation. It once had a car-rental division, it being logical to rent cars to people who took the, er, transportation method to Bug Tussle but couldn’t rely on bus service to Hooterville. A couple fellows ran the Chicagoland branch, but slowly their cars all disappeared. He never managed to find enough evidence to prove they had stolen them and sold them through their car dealership (it was harder back in the 60s), but he always had his doubts.
(looking at my posts tonight) Yes, my father was far more interesting than I am.
Nitpicks:
I believe the line was: “There’s more to life than a little bit of money, you know.”
She was asking that about the hotel, the Radisson, it’s room rates. Then she met the friend in the hotel restaurant.
