Coen Brothers: Ranking Their Films From Worst To Best

2. Fargo (1996)

Fargo is the reason this list and a thousand others like it exist at all. Their early films are all strong - again, even a "poor" Coen Brothers film is probably going to still be one hell of a movie - but Fargo was perhaps the first indication that Joel and Ethan Coen could be true masters of the form. Set in the wide, empty spaces between civilised North Dakota and Minnesota, this film contains everything audiences would come to recognise and love about the directing duo, everything from regional accents, wrinkle-faced minor characters, to sudden spurts of violence and pure, plain plotlessness. Most Coen films can be described as "the one about the guy who tried something illegal to cheat the system and it blew up in his face", but Fargo knocks that out of the park. And takes it further too: there is an incredible amount of visual storytelling in Fargo, enhancing the story told through the characters and the violence. The shot of the spinning shower curtain rings during the frantic kidnapping scene is brilliant on its own, but the mirror shot of the still rings when Jerry returns home later tells him - and us - so much. Steve Buscemi's Carl burying a case of money and then looking both ways along the unending fence, or Jerry arriving to see his father-in-law shot dead and not moving except to pop the trunk - they're small moments, but they give the larger film foundation on which the characters reach such realistic heights. A television show adaptation of Fargo is currently in production, news which has met with various moans about the purity of the movie and so on and so forth. This here author was one of those moaners, but Fargo the film is really about the characters and not the plot, and if the show sticks to that, then there are a number of directions it could take. It is a dangerous thing to attempt to recreate lightning in a bottle though, and the Coens certainly crafted something that couldn't be duplicated when they made Fargo.