Maybe the week of the U.C. Santa Barbara shootings was not the ideal time to catch up on a tragicomedy about emasculation avenged. Maybe I’m burned out on bloodbaths. But “Fargo,” FX’s adaptation of the great film by the Coen brothers, created and written by Noah Hawley, left me feeling a thousand miles away, despite its strong cast and shrewd beauty. It also raised a question that’s become a cable-drama default: How good does a violent drama need to be to make the pain of watching worth it? “Breaking Bad,” thumbs up; the brilliantly nightmarish “Hannibal,” too. Other shows—“The Walking Dead,” say—have seemed like a bad bet. As the critic James Poniewozik tweeted recently, “TV’s not a chili-pepper-eating contest.”
“Fargo” is nowhere near as graphic as these shows, and yet it has a streak of sadism that’s a serious departure from the movie, which was a snowbound noir about a decent cop chasing incompetent crooks. In it, William H. Macy played Jerry Lundegaard, a watery-eyed lummox who wears a mask of Minnesota nice. Lundegaard hires two goons to kidnap his wife, hoping to squeeze a ransom from his rich father-in-law, only to have his half-baked plot collapse out of sheer amateurishness; by the end, we’re watching one desperate fool shove another’s corpse into a wood chipper. Aesthetically, the FX show does an effective job mimicking the Coen look, with woozy shots of tiny figures in an indifferent white landscape. (For superfans, it also throws in references to other Coen films, like Easter eggs.) Yet it upends its source material’s sly and subtly humane moral vision, which spins around a brief speech by the movie’s heroine, Police Chief Marge Gunderson, played by Frances McDormand. “And for what?” she asks. “For a little bit of money. There’s more to life than a little money, you know. Don’t you know that?” In the film, violent crime is portrayed as comic and lurid but also, finally, as pathetic: the grandest plans end with a suitcase of cash buried deep beneath the snow, never to be found again.
In the television series, that suitcase gets dug up. It’s nineteen years after the original events, and, while the story isn’t identical, it has the same motifs, as if these crimes were a recurring dream: a nebbish (Martin Freeman, as Lester Nygaard) lashes out against his wife; a good-hearted female deputy (the wonderful Allison Tolman, as Molly Solverson) struggles to uncover the facts; and a team of oddball hit men (Adam Goldberg and Russell Harvard) get tangled up in the crime. But these plots have all been extended, to suit the needs of a serialized drama, like a dining-room table with leaves slapped in to accommodate extra guests. Everything has been amped up and doubled: there are now two sweet and decent policemen (Colin Hanks plays the other one), as well as two sets of bantering partners (the hit men, plus some F.B.I. agents, played by Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele). The movie’s offscreen, near-accidental wife murder becomes a closeup bludgeoning; the original small-time blackmail scam evolves into a cavalcade of glamorous massacres involving a Mob syndicate. Most striking, while the movie was a meditation on the stupidity of violence, the TV show offers up something far more familiar: a set of good-clever people who pursue a set of evil-clever people, complete with the requisite bulletin board full of pins and red strings.
This fascination with intelligent evil is most apparent in a new main character, who has no analogue in the original: a sharkish sociopath, a genius of the long con and the longer monologue. This is Lorne Malvo, played with a Mephistophelian smirk and evil hair by Billy Bob Thornton. In the first episode, Malvo runs into Lester—a meek, henpecked insurance broker—in a hospital waiting room, and he impulsively offers to murder Lester’s longtime bully. Their unspoken bargain triggers something in Lester, and, by the time the pilot ends, he’s hammered his wife to death. Unlike Macy’s spellbinding hollow man, with his big empty eyes and inability to remember his own son’s existence, Lester is a more recognizable cultural figure, a picked-on nice guy, a passive nerd who, having been insulted one too many times, activates the alpha within. Once Lester begins to kick sand back in the world’s face, we can see that he’s gone bad, but also that he’s become smarter and tougher and more strategic, through the visual shorthand of action movies: the smile that creeps across his blank face when he pulls off his first scam.
It’s possible that this switch in emphasis is intended to “raise the stakes,” as the classic network note puts it. It certainly juices the story, by giving “Fargo” ’s antihero, Lester, a motive and a history, and amplifying the evil he embraces, dramatizing it in the human (or possibly superhuman) form of Malvo. But, as a result, Malvo’s Devil figure drags “Fargo” into his orbit, which in turn places Solverson—a younger, single-gal take on the Gunderson figure—in a more familiar role, as a smart cop whose boss just won’t listen, pursuing a super-criminal. As she builds her case, Malvo toys with a religious supermarket magnate (Oliver Platt) he’s been blackmailing in hyperbolic fashion—while playing God, quite literally, he drops locusts into the supermarket and arranges for blood to pour from the man’s shower head. He dodges hit men and winds up the winner in a pair of briskly choreographed gunfights; in a sneaky-funny scene, he convinces the cops that he’s a small-town preacher. But, if his villainy does indeed raise the stakes, it also ties the show to a set of cable-TV conventions, making Malvo the sort of philosophical assassin who spools out speeches about predators and apes and women raped by Rottweilers. “There are no saints in the animal kingdom,” he tells the supermarket magnate. “Only breakfast and dinner.” The Devil is supposed to be the most interesting character in any story; here, he’s just the chattiest.
Other characters have also been cranked to eleven, including Lester’s doomed wife, who is portrayed in the pilot as a ball-busting shrew so awful that she deserved to be hammered in the face and go ungrieved—a radical switch from the original story, in which the wife was the pleasant, if dim, casualty of her husband’s greed. On almost every front, the creators have removed potential sources of ambiguity or pathos: the Nygaards have no child, and nearly all the victims of the two men’s cons are contemptible figures, often in sexualized ways. Lester’s bully’s widow is a money-grubbing slattern (played with admittedly hilarious gusto by Kate Walsh, who grabs the role with greasy palms); his sister-in-law is a bimbo who complains, “You don’t cheat on Miss Hubbard County”; and Malvo’s Barbie-like fiancée offers him her thumb up his butt as kinky payment for her diamond ring. Some of these scenes have a nifty, sicko humor, but it gets exhausting to watch a torturer roll his eyes at so many morons, suckers, and sluts, even when these roles are cast with actors as good as Glenn Howerton, who plays a personal trainer, a fake-tanned dummy who gets duct-taped to a shotgun as bait for the cops.
I’ve written before about “bad fan” dynamics, in which a subset of viewers perceive antiheroes simply as heroes, and at times “Fargo” throws red meat to this crowd, offering naughty fantasies in the guise of subversiveness. When Lester screws his bully’s widow, he does so doggy style, while staring at a picture of her and her dead husband, achieving the world’s purest revenge orgasm as she complains, “You’re hurting me.” Her being hurt is part of the fantasy, since she’s the worst. When she later confronts him at work, Lester staples her idiot sons in the face, and his female colleague coos, “You’re amazing.” Malvo’s crimes, too, are presented as at once grotesquely horrible and utterly delicious, because they’re acts of high-flown cinema, as much Scorsese as Coen. The best of these sequences are dazzling, especially a gunfight in a snowstorm, and another in which Malvo massacres his mobster enemies. As he breaks into their office building, the cameras glide over shimmering windows, which reflect the snowy streets. Deprived of blood, we get only the devastating audio: “Freeze, shitbird!” “What’s the code for the elevator?” We hear gunshots and terrified screams—until, finally, a body bursts through a window.
There are similar arresting sequences throughout “Fargo,” and, had I enjoyed the first nine episodes more (I haven’t seen the finale), this column would likely be nothing but a list of such cool stuff: Lester’s spinning washing machine as it becomes his sister-in-law’s coffee cup; the camera sliding down a bedspread into a theatre curtain; a daring one-year leap in chronology; and strong performances, including from Tolman, who elevates every scene, and Keith Carradine, as her supportive father. It would be nice to focus on only the best (and most Coen-like) sequences, such as the one in which a rabbi delivers a bloody parable on philanthropy, about a rich man who decides to donate all his organs. “Only a fool thinks he can solve the world’s problems,” the rabbi concludes. Only a fool would deny “Fargo” ’s polish and verve, its stylized razzle-dazzle. But, for me at least, after a year of gulping down chili peppers, it takes more to make a meal. ♦
