FARGO (Joel and Ethan Coen, 1996)

Despite an opening statement that it’s based on actual events, Fargo is purely the smirking, adolescent product of writer-directors Joel and Ethan Coens’ Minnesota imagination.
     Jerry Lundegaard, executive sales manager at his father-in-law’s car dealership, schemes to have his wife kidnapped so that he can pay off debts with the lion’s share of the one million-dollar ransom that his father-in-law will pay. But when they kill three persons while executing Jerry’s plan, including a police officer, the two thugs from Fargo, North Dakota, that Jerry hired demand the full ransom. (In his best boy scout mode, Jerry futilely protests over the phone, “A deal’s a deal!”—the film’s one funny moment.) Meanwhile, Police Chief Marge Gunderson investigates the murders, with more murders to follow.
     This is a cruel film; the Coen brothers hadn’t yet found the right formula for considering American violence without dipping into it themselves. They concoct dreadful sight gags: in the snow, Marge doubled over with morning sickness; the kidnapped woman, with a sack blinding her and her hands tied behind her back, stumbling as the kidnappers giggle; after one thug has killed the other, his passing his former compatriot’s body through a wood chipper. Such gags aren’t the only thing to make one gag; Jerry’s reassurance of his son in the wake of the kidnapping of the boy’s mother has an air of dismissal and disregard about it. All the snow is doubtless intended as a metaphor for an American coldness and inhumanity; but it is the Coens themselves who put the viewer in the deep freeze.
     Much of the acting is grotesque, especially that of Harve Presnell as Jerry’s father-in-law.
     Nearly everyone is treated with derision. Treated best is Marge, perhaps because she is played by Joel Coen’s wife.

OLD ENOUGH (Marisa Silver, 1984)

Her age is “almost eleven and three-quarters”; Lonnie Sloan is keeping track. “To keep [her] off the streets,” her ritzy, ever busy parents daily send her off to summer camp each morning after a distracted family breakfast. Lonnie has a little sister and book-learning; she knows that au revoir is French for “goodbye.” Only, this definition deletes the sociable part that refers to time. Like most kids, Lonnie doesn’t know as much as she thinks she does.
     Karen Bruckner, two years older, is tougher, lonelier. Her father is superintendant of a working-class apartment building. Her older brother, the family light, bullies her and other kids, and pursues sex. Karen’s family is as devoutly Roman Catholic as Lonnie’s is “nothing” when it comes to faith. With Karen taking the lead, Karen and Lonnie strike up an unlikely friendship on the street one day. It begins uncertainly, but in no time Karen is teaching Lonnie to skip camp, steal makeup from the five-’n’-dime and go to confession!
     Writer-director Marisa Silver—filmmaker Joan Micklin Silver’s daughter has since turned full-fledged novelist—has fashioned one of cinema’s warmest, most truthful coming-of-age comedies. The two girls fight, break up and make up a few different times, each conflict exposing pride and sensitivities. They’re both fascinated by a tenant in Karen’s building, a 32-year-old salon worker whose jeans are skin-tight. They dream of growing up, but one worries over any closeness between them that might appear lesbian to others.
     Silver and her cutter, Mark Burns, devise a progression of scenes wherein one often seems to extend the previous scene until it points up a time-ellipsis between the two. The discrepancy between expectation and reality helps make patches of real time seem like elongations, composing a sophisticated contemplation of time and experience.

TWILIGHT SAMURAI (Yôji Yamada, 2002)

Despite fulsome praise (it swept Japan’s industry prizes), Yôji Yamada’s Tasogare Seibei is a major disappointment. Stately, low-keyed, painstakingly lit and cinematographed (a procedure too selfconsciously painterly for my taste), it unfolds in the last half of the nineteenth century during the Meiji Restoration. By this point Japan was modernizing and the Bushido Code was all that samurai had of the past to hold onto. Their numbers had dwindled, and poverty as well as the disgrace of non-utility was increasingly their lot. Seibei, who has even become a figure of ridicule, is such an individual. Seibei’s noble calling has been replaced by humiliatingly lowly labor: keeping records of stored food for his clan—as material and cut-and-dried an exercise as one can imagine. A widower, he must do any work he can to support his mother and two daughters. An occasion for—how else to describe it?—tainted nobility does arise, with Seibei fighting a duel over a former girlfriend with her abusive ex-husband. This, too, reduces his eternal and national commitment to a domestic and personally nostalgic matter. Already his stench from work has drawn censure from the head of his clan, felling him into earthy disgrace.
     Much of this portrait is dubious, exaggerated; the film “piles things on,” even having Seibei’s uncle suggest he should commit harakiri. (A deft touch: Seibei has pawned his samurai sword, replacing it with bamboo.) To justify all this, Yamada goes the Life Is Beautiful (1998) route, turning the action into an adoring family legend. Roberto Benigni’s film, however, folds a charming, loopy romantic comedy into a larger historical tragedy; it really does work as the perpetuation of a family legend. This isn’t the case with Yamada’s humorless film, which is narratively framed, by voiceover, as the lifetime-later reminiscence of Seibei’s elder daughter. This presentation of the material is merely a strategy for the open license that the filmmakers have given themselves to carry on however they desire.
     Ultimately Seibei’s clan assigns him a final mission. The methods that the clan applies to get him to do it, as well as the substance of the mission, further testify to Seibei’s and the clan’s degraded state.
     Is there anything positive I can say about this empty, interminably boring film? Yes. It is far, far better than Edward Zwick’s The Last Samurai (2003), which dramatizes the revolt against Japan’s modernizing emperor in which Seibei lost his life, we learn from Yamada’s film.