Fargo, a perfect 30-year-old thriller, is all about doing your damn job

30 years on, Marge Gunderson is still a hero for our time

Fargo is noir turned on its head. Working with the visionary cinematographer Roger Deakins, the Coens expose this usually shadowy genre to the blinding, unforgiving whiteout of the Minnesotan midwinter. Working with the brilliant actor Frances McDormand, the directors swap the typical, tragically doomed femme fatale out for her inverse: a sunny, imperturbable, heavily pregnant police chief, Marge Gunderson.

Marge is one of the great heroes of film history, and not just for the reasons you might think. She’s resourceful, intuitive, cool under pressure, unfailingly moral, and a good shot. The character is as radically progressive now as it was 30 years ago. How many pregnant women are allowed to be the main characters of movies that are about anything other than their pregnancy? I can’t think of one, never mind one in which they lead an investigation into a messy multiple homicide and bungled kidnapping.

But what’s really radical about Marge is that she just does her damn job: no less, but no more. She does it well and then goes home to her happy life, untouched by the violent cynicism of the quagmire she’s had to mop up.

Marge doesn’t appear for the first third of Fargo’s crisp 98-minute runtime. During that time, the Coens — director Joel and producer Ethan, who co-wrote the movie, as per usual — spin up a criminal plot of perfect venality and incompetence. Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy), a timid, appallingly selfish car salesman, hires a pair of crooks, Carl and Gaear (Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare), to kidnap his own wife so he can scam his rich father-in-law out of the ransom. It all goes horribly wrong, with Carl and Gaear leaving a trail of bodies behind them. Then it goes even wronger.

Marge only has to take one look at the wreckage in the snow to map out exactly what happened. But while she’s a gifted police officer, Fargo is more than just the competence porn of so many other detective stories. And as far as her character is concerned, it’s framed in a very different way.

Ever since Sherlock Holmes, we’ve reveled in watching detectives use their talent to unpick the villain’s designs. But their gift usually comes at a price — like Holmes’ addiction, or Poirot’s unpleasantness. Their cases consume them. They’re distant and obsessed, the other side of the criminals’ coin.

For a while, women detectives escaped the curse. Miss Marple and Jessica Fletcher plied their trade with joyful ease. But eventually, the women succumbed too: like the pathologically lonely and alcoholic Jane Tennison in ‘90s procedural show Prime Suspect, or Clarice Starling getting drawn into a dance with the devil in The Silence of the Lambs. The closest thing to a British Fargo is the BBC cop show Happy Valley, set in the wilds of Yorkshire; its eternally pissed off Sergeant Catherine Cawood is as implacably competent as Marge, but her personal life is mired in the mess. Jodie Foster’s Liz Danvers in True Detective: Night Country seems explicitly modeled on Marge at first, but in the end, she’s just as haunted and prickly as all the boys.

Marge isn’t like that. There’s no skeleton in her closet, and her mind isn’t only on the case. She takes leisurely lunch and dinner breaks with her devoted husband Norm and they constantly discuss food; she is eating for two, after all. When she follows a lead to Minneapolis, she takes the opportunity to look up an old high school acquaintance. Work isn’t everything. And outside of work, she’s fallible. The high-school buddy is clingy and obsessive, but her vanity around him makes her gullible in the face of his sob story. She forgets to charge her police car’s battery: “Prowler needs a jump!”

These things don’t make her a worse police officer. They make her better, because they make her more human. Her life is a fortress of stability, goodness, and, in the nicest possible way, not really caring. She is the living embodiment of work-life balance, and her heavy belly is the proof. She’s a formidable bulwark against the deception, petty greed, and grotesque violence of all Fargo’s pathetic men, both because she has the skills to combat it and because she simply rejects it. She’ll do her job to take them down, and at the end of the day — sometimes even in the middle of it, for her lunch hour — she’ll turn her back on their world.

“There’s more to life than a little money, you know. Don’t you know that?” Marge asks one of the villains after arresting him. It doesn’t sound like a rhetorical question, but he doesn’t answer. “And here you are. And it’s a beautiful day!” Never mind the cliché of a great detective needing to get inside the criminal’s mind; she doesn’t understand him at all. It’s a beautiful day. Why bother?

Fargo is unsparing about the weakness, corruption, misogyny, and dark, self-destructive impulses of its man-children. Marge professionally walks them down and picks up the pieces. Then she clocks off and goes home to grow something better. At this moment — at all moments – we could all do with being a bit more like Marge.

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Fargo is available to stream on Amazon Prime Video and HBO Max, and to rent or buy from Apple, Google, and similar digital stores.