More Fargo

Matt Zoller Seitz's tribute to Marge Gunderson got me thinking about the other great performance from that film -- William H. Macy as Jerry Lundegaard. Macy's performance is complementary to McDormand's, and his character is the flip side of Gunderson's, the other face of middle class existence and the one most typically presented by Hollywood as representative of middle class values. In Lundegaard, we have the grinning, platitude-spouting hypocrite, the hollow man for whom success means money. His plot to kidnap his own wife and to share the ransom (which he expects to be paid by his rich father-in-law) with the lowlifes who do the kidnapping dramatizes the completeness with which he has commodified his existence. For Lundegaard, everything has a price tag -- integrity, values, family, wife.

There's a powerful undertow of desperation in Macy's performance, though, that rescues the character from sheer evil banality, though Lundegaard is certainly banally evil, too. Macy plays Lundegaard as if from the start he knows that he's trapped, and the trap seems to be, not the "carved from marble" decency of Marge Gunderson, but the "Hollywood" appraisal and dismissal of lives like Marge's and, potentially, Lundegaard's. Ultimately, it's not Jerry's middle class conventions that do him in; it's his willingness to see and judge lives like his and Marge's with the jaded eye of his intellectual and cultural "betters" -- to treat his own role and the conventions of his existence with contempt.

Of course, the rap on the Coen brothers is that they themselves treat their characters with contempt, but I think that's a trap they spring on lazy critics who seem blithely unaware of what such carping might reveal about their own assumptions and preconceptions. More wily critics suggest that the superb actors in the Coen brother's movies raise their characters above the scorn which the filmmakers seek to heap on them. Even in their broadest comedies, though, there's a core of decency in the "good" characters that can't be attributed strictly to the good acting. Look at (or listen to) H. I. McDonnough's (Nicholas Cage's) final "vision" in Raising Arizona, for instance:

But still I dreamed on, further into the future than I'd ever dreamed before. Watching Nathan Junior's progress from afar . . . takin' pride in his accomplishments, as if he were our own, wonderin' if he ever thought of us, and hopin' that maybe we'd broadened his horizons a little, even if he couldn't remember just how they got broadened. But still I hadn't dreamt nothin' about me and Ed, until the end. And this was cloudier, because it was years, years away. But I saw an old couple bein' visited by their children and all their grandchildren too. The old couple weren't screwed up, and neither were their kids or their grandkids. And I don't know. You tell me. This whole dream. Was it wishful thinkin'? Was I just fleein'reality, like I know I'm liable to do? But me and Ed, we can be good too. And it seemed real. It seemed like us. And it seemed like, well... our home. lf not Arizona, then a land not too far away, where all parents are strong and wise and capable and all children are happy and beloved. I don't know. Maybe it was Utah.

Who is the joke on here? Is it on H. I. McDonnough with his dropped word endings and his visions and his biblical idiom? Or is it on those who would judge McDonnough's vision of a better life with as much contempt as they judge McDonnough himself?

Jerry Lundegaard grins and grimaces at the cinematic world which he inhabits in the manner of a man who fears that no matter what he does, the joke is going to be on him. The possibility of tragedy has been denied him, and he knows it. It's up to Marge to restore the possibility -- if not the fact -- of tragedy by reminding us that those decent, despised middle class virtues are noble and worthy, and that to fall short of them -- or to reject and laugh at them -- can be the saddest, most pathetic fate of all.