Sizzling ‘Fargo’ has it down cold
Second outing takes success of the first and runs with it
Anything you can do twice can’t be called impossible.
So instead, let’s just say that the tasks Fargo creator Noah Hawley continues to set for himself would exceed the bounds of possibility for most any other writer. First, he set about making a TV version that had nothing in common with the Oscar-winning Coen brothers film beyond the general setting, the tone and the title. The effort seemed presumptuous, but the result was shockingly brilliant and totally satisfying.
Now the harder task: to replicate that success when expectations are sky-high, and the disastrous example of HBO’s True
Detective looms large. Well, if the first four episodes are a fair indication, he has once again succeeded brilliantly, with a second series that is linked to the first and yet stands triumphantly on its own.
We’re once again in that “OK, then” landscape where Minnesota meets South Dakota, but the year is 1979. While America waits for a hero (as indicated by an amusingly off-kilter opening), we find one in young state trooper Lou Solverson — Patrick Wilson, who shines in the role previously played by Keith Carradine.
Lou is our link to that first outing, and the link in this one to a new set of characters: Ed Blum-quist (Jesse Plemons) — a gentle butcher who can’t quite grasp the depths of his wife Peggy’s (Kirsten Dunst) unhappiness or selfishness — and Rye Gerhardt (Kieran Culkin), the youngest son of a Fargo crime family, who is tired of being bullied by his older brother Dodd (Jeffrey Donovan) and wants a score of his own.
And then you have the rest of the Gerhardt clan, led by its deceptively tough matriarch, Floyd (Jean Smart), facing its greatest criminal challenge. A more organized group of organized criminals (well-represented by Brad Garrett and Bokeem Woodbine) are heading their way, and planning a sort-of corporate takeover.
As before, their paths cross as good clashes with evil. The special insight of Fargo, however, is that most people don’t fall into either divide. Once again, the pivotal characters are those whose dedication to walking the straight and narrow falters the moment that path becomes difficult or a more tempting one arises. Deluded and unpredictable, they’re the ones most at risk, and the ones who pose the greatest dangers.
Fargo crackles with mordant wit and sustained tension. And yet, wisely, Hawley always finds a way to remind us of what’s at risk, in a lovely moment between Lou and his ailing wife (Cristin Milioti); in Ed’s dreams of a family and a business; in Peggy’s desire for an “actualized” dream of her own. Fargo consistently rockets between the incredibly strange and the comfortingly mundane and makes you believe they belong together.
It also does its best to make you believe you’re back in the 1970s, right down to copying the split-screen look of period movies. But this is not style for style’s sake. We feel both the malaise and thrill of a decade in which any change seemed possible and when many feared those changes would end badly.
The cast is spectacular, with nary a false note. Granted, we’ve all seen limited series that start well and then collapse. But remember this: The first
Fargo started great and only got better. Can the second do so as well? You betcha it’s possible.