‘Fargo’ tells crime story with amazing grace
The following contains spoilers for “Fargo” Season 5.
Bakers will tell you Bisquick is a cheat. But to swiftly produce a biscuit, Bisquick exists as a userfriendly material. Just add milk and heat, and you have bread to break with the weird killer sitting at your kitchen table.
Such is the scene that concludes the fifth season of the TV series “Fargo,” a show that kneads the decades-spanning General Mills product into its 10episode arc. This “Fargo” finale made me consider our golden age of television, which is about a quarter-century old. Troubled protagonists ushered in peak TV: Tony Soprano, Omar Little, Jackie Peyton, Walter White, Seth Bullock. But societal toxicity no longer requires an hourlong drama: We’re the characters in a narrative that is endlessly combative and messy, refreshed constantly to maximize outrage. The stranglehold of the anti-hero appears to have loosened.
Four years ago, in a summer pocked by anxiety — electoral, cultural, viral — “Ted Lasso” arrived as an unassuming salve. Its success was due to its sweet tone, no doubt, but also because that tone felt so foreign. The feel of Season 5 of “Fargo” is quite different from “Lasso,” though there are similarities beyond their casting of the magical Juno Temple. In both stories, the heroes — Temple’s Dot in “Fargo,” Jason Sudeikis’ Ted in “Lasso” — deliberately disappear to escape struggles at home. In “Lasso,” the struggle is a marriage quietly coming undone. In “Fargo,” the struggle is the escape from a forced and violent marriage.
“Lasso” was a meditation on home. “Fargo” is a meditation on debt and forgiveness. Both present a radical grace as sword and shield.
Fact and fiction
I skipped the first four seasons of “Fargo” because the pilot episode of Noah Hawley’s anthology show felt too tightly derived from the Joel and Ethan Coen film “Fargo” (1996) from which Hawley took a title and inspiration. I’ve already begun to double back to the show’s earlier seasons. Such is the strength of Season 5.
Also, I admit I was mistaken in cutting bait on that first season.
Hawley has created a crime anthology that, to my mind, provides a counterweight for the glitzier “American Crime Story” series. By setting his stories in and around the cold confines of Minnesota and North Dakota, Hawley tells crime stories with a subtler resonance. They possess a more humble outrageousness.
Here, it bears mention that the Coen brothers’ “Fargo” opens with a message: “This is a true story. … At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.”
Hawley begins each episode of his “Fargo” with the same disclaimer. Does that make these stories factual? Certainly not. But the show tracks the factually possible on its path to building a regional mythology.
I’ll try to avoid a cumbersome narrative summary for this season of “Fargo,” just to say that the series ends with Dot Lyon reunited with her daughter and husband: the family she started when she assumed a new name and identity after escaping abduction by her first husband, a monstrous lawman/militant. Much of the season found her on the run from her past.
The Lyon family’s quiet evening at home is jarred by the presence of Ole Munch, a killer seeking to resolve an outstanding issue. While attempting to abduct Dot at the show’s outset, Munch lost part of his ear.
He believes the wound to be a debt. He’s come to collect.
Bad hair day
I’ll also try to avoid a cumbersome accounting of how this story’s archetypes connect to the Coen brothers’ filmography. But Hawley’s series is a grassy backyard on Easter Sunday teeming with Easter eggs — lines of dialogue, camera shots, costumes and props — that connect it to the Coens’ work. The show also works with regular Coen archetypes: humble heroes, bumbling crooks and angels of death.
Those angels of death, without fail in the Coen-verse, bear the mark of a bad haircut. To these angels, style is of no concern. Like Leonard Smalls (hair: deranged perm) in the Coens’ 1987 film “Raising Arizona,” Lorne Malvo (hair: balding Bieber) in “Fargo” Season 1 and Anton Chigurh (hair: deranged pageboy) in the Coens’ 2007 film “No Country for Old Men,” Munch (hair: deranged pageboy with bangs) is a classic Coen angel of death. He walks among us yet exists detached from any of our mammalian and terrestrial concerns.
“Me,” Malvo says in the first season of “Fargo,” “I’m the consequence.”
Munch, too, is a consequence. He’s a 500-year-old mythological sin-eater from Wales who speaks in bizarre-isms and carries out his grisly chores without any emotional connections.
Smalls blew up a rabbit with a hand grenade. Chigurh allowed a coin toss to determine the fate of some of his marks. These aren’t entities measured by any emotional markers we’re accustomed to using. They’re purely dutiful debt collectors.
Munch carries out his work as if by ledger. When refused compensation for a job gone bad, he takes action to even the score with those who crossed him. When that debt is settled, he moves to the next one, which brings him to the Lyon household. He admires Dot, whom he refers to as “the tiger.” But she wronged him by wounding him. His admiration is as clinical as his purpose: to secure payment.
But here is the twist: Hawley flips a fatalism that coursed through the film “Fargo.” That movie’s Marge Gunderson, a dogged police officer, oh-jeezed into the void with a monologue that expresses her moral befuddlement at the world.
She confronts a killer with her own ledger: “So that was Mrs. Lundegaard on the floor in there. And I guess that was your accomplice in the wood chipper. And those three people in Brainerd. And for what? For a little bit of money. There’s more to life than money, ya know. Don’t you know that? And here ya are. And it’s a beautiful day.
“Well, I just don’t understand it.”
It’s the mantra of the ’70s Los Angeles crime classic “Chinatown” retrofitted for North Dakota in the 1990s.
A less plucky but equally resigned denouement informs “No Country for Old Men,” which tiptoes to the edge of nihilism.
In that film, Chigurh didn’t just dispatch Llewelyn Moss, the welder and good old boy who made a decision — swiping money from a drug deal shootout — that placed him into debt. Chigurh imposed further repercussions on Moss’ decision to try to keep money that wasn’t his. With Moss dead, Chigurh then paid a visit to Moss’ widow. The scene echoes at the end of Season 5 of “Fargo.”
To a point.
In “No Country,” Carla Jean Moss doesn’t beg for her life, but she does attempt to negotiate with Chigurh, who offers her the best deal he can. He’ll flip a coin. She calls heads or tails. She tells him, “The coin don’t have no say.”
Chigurh insists it does. Munch, sitting in Lyon’s den, deliberately nods to Chigurh, sitting with Carla Jean. Munch cryptically states his beliefs. Dot assumes a protective maternal mode, trying to shield her family while negotiating unsuccessfully. Their negotiation over debt moves to the kitchen. Then, the dining area.
The way Hawley, the writer, and Thomas Bezucha, the director, set the scene is coiled with tension, particularly after nine episodes of kaleidoscopic violence.
But Dot, a formidable defender, doesn’t vanquish her counterpart by force. Instead, she reaches for a familiar yellow box and pours its mix of flour, baking soda and such into a bowl. She adds milk and heat.
Dot refuses to play a role placed upon her, that of debtor. She renegotiates as nurturer. The resolution confounds the angel of death sitting at her kitchen table. The biscuit — and the intention behind the biscuit — do what money and coin flips and begging and, especially, guns have failed to do in these stories for years. They nurture a moment of grace.
As a viewer, it confounded me, too, tonic amid the tumult. Breaking bread to break a cycle of violence: It feels wholly foreign, not just in the sprawling culture created by the Coen brothers and Hawley, but in the sprawling culture of ours that informed their work.