Noah Hawley’s Fargo is back with more laughs as the body count rises
The darkly comic crime anthology series Fargo is back after three years, and with its creator still at the helm it’s off to a good start.
With a big round of applause, please welcome back Noah Hawley’s Fargo after three long years of anticipation. Anyone who has encountered his audacious, highly original storytelling will be delighted to be enticed once again into Hawley’s eerie, cinematically flamboyant, comically violent dreamscape, inspired by the original Coen brothers’ movie. This time, while still echoing the films of Joel and Ethan Coen, Cormac McCarthy and Quentin Tarantino, Hawley provides a kind of meditation on the gangster movies of Martin Scorsese while remaining definitely original.
Since 2014 Hawley has given us three series of mesmerising prairie noir tales of good folks driven blood simple by rage and stupidity, based imaginatively on the Oscar-winning movie. Like the original, they also happened to be comedies, ingrained with the trademark Coen brothers humour and that quality of so-called “Minnesota nice” — the culture of over-the-top politeness to strangers and perpetual cheeriness — that made the film so popular.
But Fargo was a surprise to all concerned with the production, except maybe Hawley, when it worked so successfully, given the idea was so idiosyncratic and Hawley hardly a hot shot when he arrived with the idea. He was a novelist with an emerging track record, though poor sales, who had worked as a writer on the television series Bones, but the two TV shows he had created, The Unusuals and My Generation, were cancelled before their first seasons were complete.
Hawley’s pitch to groundbreaking cable network FX was unorthodox — to connect a new TV series to an Academy Award-winning movie by the merest of threads but still, like the movie, be a comic rumination of violence in America. “I said to them that every year you could tell a whole new story that fits into the mindset of what Fargo means,” he told Wisconsin Public Radio. “You know it’s both evocative of a place — what Joel and Ethan called ‘Siberia with family restaurants’. You know, sort of open tundra, but also now after that movie it’s evocative of a kind of story, you know, a true-crime story where truth is stranger than fiction.”
The idea was to channel the Coen brothers’ sensibility, that idiosyncratic blend of folksy comedy and pitiless menace that their film inspired but with new characters and totally different stories. It was never intended by Hawley to be “the continuing adventures of”.
The show, which won an Emmy for best limited series in 2014, the first of 51 from its 226 award nominations, has propelled him to enormous success as a writer, producer and director — so much so that the expression “Hawleywood” has begun to follow him around. His only recent misfire was the movie Lucy in the Sky (2019), which starred Natalie Portman in another of her roles as a conflicted and highly emotionally complex character, this time in a psychological drama about a NASA astronaut. It disappointed despite some showy craft tricks from Hawley, who has matured into a technically accomplished director.
Season four of Fargo is certainly as visually arresting as you might hope, the showrunner again working with cinematographer Dana Gonzales, who came on to the show after the season one pilot and is now Hawley’s key collaborator. Together they create a new look for each season, this time with the location changed to Kansas City in 1950. And they opt evocatively for a vintage Kodachrome feel, those vibrant colours and sharp images, so that the show looks a little like a 50s movie, redolent of the time when the film industry began to battle against the growing popularity of the new small, black-and-white screens of television.
And while a little less in the vein of the first seasons, the new show is certainly what Hawley calls another story like the original movie, an American story about the American landscape, “and the things that people do for money”. Of course it is also about the way people become entrapped in violent, needless, generally ill-starred events that are propelled by slip-ups, confusion and folly. And immersed in another period setting, one of the tricks of the show really, he brings what he terms “both the comedy and drama of hindsight”.
Somewhere in the Fargo cosmos is a book called The History of True Crime in the Midwest, a compendium of criminal atrocities both major and minor, across the expanse of US history. And each season of Fargo has focused on different sets of characters, some related, in different periods. So, Welcome to the Alternate Economy, the first new episode, begins in 1950 as a young black girl begins to deliver “My History Report”: facing the camera in a schoolroom while behind her through an interior window we see a boy being beaten by a teacher. (The symmetrical framing suggests the Coens’ 1987 film Raising Arizona, the first of a number of nods.) The girl is 16-year-old Ethelrida Pearl Smutney, “a student of exceptional virtue and high achievement” played with poise and gravitas by Emyri Crutchfield, and her narration initially propels the first episode.
She speaks of slavery and the travails of the immigrant experience in America: “Whoever was the last off the boat, finding the doors of honest capital closed, rolled up their sleeves and got to work, getting rich the old-fashioned way.” Her monologue is interrupted several times, jump cuts showing her being taken down the corridor for a beating from the racist teachers. She explains how the system is antagonistic to arrivals, pitting one against another so it remains impregnable. “If America is a nation of immigrants,” she asks, “then how does one become American?” Her report takes us back to 1900 and the early immigrant criminal gangs looking for purchase in the promised land of America. First, in a series of beautifully staged set pieces, the Jewish Moskowitz Syndicate is overwhelmed by the Irish Milligan Concern, after the leaders have perpetuated an arcane ritual in which each family exchanges a son to be raided by the other family as a means to maintain order and leverage the peace. (These scenes might be straight out of Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, murder lurking in every corner of dark rooms.)
In 1928 we see the massacre of the Jewish gang and the initiation of the Irish son to killing, boys forced to the centre of revenge and reprisal; then Hawley plummets us into 1934 and the arrival of the Italian gang, the Fadda family, who take out the Irish. As Ethelrida tells us sagely: “Winston Churchill says history is written by the victors — that’s a fancy word for the winners.”
Then, in 1950, the story finds the Italians led by Donatello Fadda (Tommaso Ragno) and tempestuous son Josto (Jason Schwartzman), under siege from a black criminal organisation led by Loy Cannon (Chris Rock) and his sagacious, imperturbable right-hand Doctor Senator (Glynn Turman).
“Here’s the thing about America — the minute you relax somebody is going to come along looking for a piece of your pie,” Ethelrida tells us with a lovely crisp definition of capitalism.
The inevitable complication, the major plot twist really at this point, is that Loy’s son Satchel (Rodney L. Jones III) is being raised by the Faddas, while Donatello’s son Zero (Jameson Braccioforte) is being raised by Loy.
Ethelride’s story continues alongside the mounting tension between the gangsters, her mixed-race family undertakers at the King of Tears mortuary, her father handling the whites and her black mother the “coloureds”, the family carrying some kind of debt to Loy Cannon’s group.
Another story, so far connected only through murder, concerns a seemingly almost supernaturally wholesome nurse called Oraetta Mayflower (again note the wonderful moniker), played brilliantly by Jessie Buckley, who brings the Minnesota connection we’ve been waiting for to the narrative — an impressive performance full of sweetness and menace.
There are other threads of other storylines as well, and a slightly confusing quantity of characters, at one point identified by graphics. But Hawley and Gonzales keep it all kinetic with swooping wide shots on cranes that take their cameras through all sorts of seemingly impossible angles, the constantly moving camera telling the story. And Jeff Russo’s jazzy soundtrack is a delight.
Once again, though in a very different narrative approach, more epic this time, Hawley uses a catalyst, the joining of rival gangs, to bring many different players into orbit around each other on a collision course. He does it wilfully in such a way that initially we have little idea which ones will collide at all. He says he does this to the point at which the story grows unpredictable and sticks in the brain.
Then he designs enough moving pieces to ensure “that it does have that element of randomness to it and unpredictability which I think is, hopefully, one of our hallmarks”.
It’s all wonderfully pulpy and immediately immersive, and you remain confident that it will all feel inevitable by the end of the body count. And those laughs along the way. Welcome back, Hawley.
Fargo, Thursday, 8.30pm, SBS.
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