John and Al welcome Jesse Perry to talk about Tarantino's sloppiest piece of provocation, DJANGO UNCHAINED. They talk at great length about the film's great length, speculate on different iterations the movie could have taken, manage to avoid saying the N-Word, even once!
Okay, things are really cooking now. The mob war is in full swing, with
assassinations and kidnappings and counterplots flowing back and forth, and it’s
at the intersection of this kind of intricate plotting and idiosyncratic character
detail where the series shines most reliably.
The only real downside to all this gangster action is how it pushes Deafy
and especially Ethelrida into making only brief, wordless cameos. But even without the benefit of actual dialogue,
the girl’s letter and marshal’s stakeout are still out there in the mix,
disseminating information from one strand of plot to another, so it’s not as
though they have just been forgotten.
And if there is one outright gripe to get out of the way, it is how the show has Swanee shoot Gaetano in the head to knock him out and kidnap him. Bad enough how the show is relying on the silly old trope that a simple bonk on the head is a totally secure and reliable way to put someone to sleep until you drag them to the next plot point, rather than a dangerous and wildly imprecise method that, even if it manages to hit the sweet spot between not killing a person outright and leaving them awake and pissed off, is still incredibly unlikely to incapacitate them for an interval of more than 30 seconds. What is especially irksome is how the set up was such that Swanee could have just as easily clobbered him with something from behind as actually fire a bullet into his head, creating a brief sense that the show was teasing the death of a major character and quickly backtracking from it. Not that Fargo has ever been precious about offing major characters before the climax, so it’s not like I think they were just afraid to go there. But it was an annoying note for just how unnecessary it was to get where the scene is going.
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| "We had nitpickers like this in Salt Lake a few years back..." |
But overall, this was a crackerjack episode that more than made up for that one bum note with escalating action that strained the divided loyalties of various supporting players to their breaking points. Odis gets batted back and forth most brutally, with Loy mock-executing and forcing him to first give up Gaetano’s whereabouts and then attempt to retrieve Satchel. Well, I guess he forces him to first listen to a menacing thematically resonant monologue about fighting the weight of history and owning human beings as chattel, then give up Gaetano, then get the boy. Chris Rock is handling these threatening speeches well individually, but the character is edging closer to self-parody as more and more of his scenes center around them. In any case, it has the desired effect on the crooked cop, who scurries to work for his new criminal masters.
Loy knows, or should know, that the chances of this actually saving his son are dicey at best, but he also doesn’t have time to concoct a better plan. Because Josto, for his part, has already given the order to kill the boy, realizing that the inevitable retaliation will actually work to rid him of his troublesome sibling without explicitly going against New York’s order to work with him, and still allow a potential avenue to de-escalate the war by pinning responsibility on the other disloyal thorn in his side, Calamita, and offering up his scalp as a peace offering. It’s a ruthless and surprisingly savvy bit of gangster scheming to come from the pipsqueak don whose flailing we have mostly been invited to laugh at (and who still offers the biggest laughs of the episode trying to suppress his glee at the prospect of his brother’s death).
But it’s undone by a touch of bad timing, and the fact that neither of the hangdog underlings he entrusts with the details of the plan choose loyalty to him over conscience. We pretty much knew which way Rabbi would break, as he has told us he would protect the boy no matter what on multiple occasions already. More of a surprise is poor bastard Antoon Dumini, as the latest minor Fargo character to receive a sudden, emotionally fraught and surprisingly effective spotlight. He has been a hapless flunkie all season, up through two-thirds of this episode even, before the final act is given over to a look at his family situation and immigrant story of his own. He was brought to Kansas as a prisoner of war, having been an actual child soldier of the type Rabbi claims his original family made him. He takes Satchel to the titular, abandoned POW camp for his Miller’s Crossing-esque death march. But reminiscing about how simply arriving in the land of plenty once revived him from the "skeleton" that years of wartime hardship and privation had made him jars something in his spirit. At the moment of truth, can’t bring himself to pull the trigger.
His reward for defying orders and refusing to let an
innocent child die is to be immediately shot in the back by Rabbi. For whom killing another man making
essentially the same moral choice as he is functions as a big heroic moment. What does that mean? It’s never very clear in the quixotic moral world
of Fargo. Maybe Antoon’s decision came in time to save his soul, but not
his life. Maybe it’s just a bleak joke. The chance that we ever get definitive
answers to questions like that are about as good as Dr. Harvard’s odds of
making it through the season without being poisoned by a macaroon.
I come to Fargo as much for the speechifying as I do for the gangland warfare. The mix of those elements is key to the entire appeal of the series, and one certainly cannot say that there was a lack of developments or “action” on the gangster front in “The Birthplace Of Civilization”, in the form of multiple police raids and on-screen murders, including the most significant casualty to date. But I can say that the speeches were wearing a bit thin. Sheer volume was an issue, but repetition was the real killer. Monologuing can be a very effective form of drama, but to deploy it so constantly, each iteration really needs to bring something new to the table. New information about a particular character or conflict would be most preferable, but it could also be a fresh angle on a recurring theme, or just an especially deft bit of writing, a special flair in the performance, or particular innovative staging. And while all these things are evident in bits and flecks throughout the episode, they were spread rather thinly throughout the myriad scenes of characters lengthily orating.
For instance, Loy gives two monologues himself within the episode. The one where he unloads on his wife and mother-in-law does reveal the more brutal side that has facilitated his rise within the underworld, so that is a little something new compared to the cool and relatively benign figure he's cut up to this point. But that nasty side also comes out in his scenes taking over the Smutney’s mortuary business and impressing Zelmaire and Swannee into the army he is building with the help of soon-to-be-deceased Mort Kellerman of Fargo (hey, that’s the name of the show!). And the writing and delivery aren’t unique enough for the scene to stand out from the upteen versions of an angry crime husband yelling at a worried crime wife about “HOW DID YOU THINK WE CAN AFFORD YOUR LAVISH LIFESTYLE???” stretching back through The Sopranos to The Godfather and beyond.
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| "Damn it, woman I work hard all day long, can't you just fill in the rest of the blanks in this rant for yourself??" |
The other Loy monologue, detailing Odis’s personal history,
certainly brings new information and shading to that character. But those revelations are a bit stepped on when
later in the episode, we get a second scene recounting some of the same info,
along with an even more tragic dimension to the backstory. Odis was certainly in need of this definition, as he had often seemed like a collection of writerly tics more than a real
person, but I think we actually needed more space between learning about his wartime
experience and the horrible fate of his fiancée. As it is, it feels like the surplus of tics
have been justified by a surplus of origin-story melodrama involving landmines
and horribly murdered lovers. Which works after a
fashion, but still just feels like a whole lot. The scene in his apartment is at least buoyed
somewhat by Jack Huston’s soulful performance and one really nice capper line
where he closes off his reverie about how clouds in France look difference by describing that difference as “I dunno. French, I guess.”
One good line is about all I can really mark in favor of Gaetano’s latest raspy ranting about American softness and his own brutal prowess. Which prowess is not demonstrated very effectively when he is just gunning down unwitting, unarmed civilians rather than facing off with any substantial character or force. The scene has nothing new to offer on a character level and hardly even rates on Fargo’s own internal scale of “acts of horrendously theatrical cruelty inflicted on minor characters to demonstrate the villain’s depravity” (I still remember Glenn Howerton duct taped to an exercise bike and a guy named Skip being buried alive in seasons past, even if I don't recall the exact reasons any of that stuff happened). So about the only note of interest is Gaetano’s musing that shoddy American workmanship can be attributed to how “everyone thinks they gonna be president, so nobody do the job they have.” But one good line can’t salvage a weak scene.
Josto also references running for president in his visit to
the jailhouse in order to further undermine the Cannon morale. It does seem a bit of a stretch that the boy
king is deep-thinking enough to come up with such trenchant musings on not just the why of
America’s love of a crime story, but also the racist how of it. But the line about how society sees a white crook like him as “just a guy using crime to get ahead”, while when it looks at the black
men it “just sees crime” is a one I have not heard put in quite those
terms before. Along with the beautiful
lighting and clustering of more important characters, it overcomes the more
blatant metafictional bent to just work in a way Gaetano’s scene does not.
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| I'm about one week away from listing Gaetano's entire character as a homage to Wheezy Joe in the Coen reference section |
It also underlines an aspect of the conflict that is
becoming more apparent in this episode, which is that despite the fraternal
rivalries undermining the Faddas from within, they still benefit from the racial
disparities of the 1950s/America enough that it’s the Cannons that have the
more uphill fight ahead of them. They
may have a surplus of guns from the hijacked truck and less general slapdickery
in the ranks, but they are still in a spot where Hearing Music While Black constitutes
enough of a crime to be assaulted and locked up en masse. Which does
feed back into the ideas about the nature of crime that come up in Josto’s speech
as well as Zelmaire and Swannee’s more poetic musings about their outlaw
lifestyle.
To be honest, I always roll my eyes some when a cops/robbers story gets into this territory, where it is laying out some sort of thesis on the nature Crime as an abstract concept. It's entirely facile to think that even all violent crimes are alike in some way, much less lumping them in with property crime, sex crime, drug “crime”, all of which have their own sets of unique permutations, not to mention the difference between organized crimes and those of passion, or opportunity, or political animus. By the opposite token, it also struck me as fairly simple-minded of the girls to be proudly touting the disorganized nature of their crime as a deliberate choice to devote themselves to anarchist principles, in contrast to more button-downed gangsters that want to keep “square” society up and running so they can continue to siphon profits off it. It might not be true that all crimes constitute Crime, but armed robbery is armed robbery is more or less armed robbery no matter who the mark is. If the gals are robbing just anyone with money, they aren’t much different from the organized crooks they disdain, and if they are robbing exclusively from gangsters, that really just makes them a barnacle on the barnacle of the societal structures they claim to reject.
I genuinely can’t tell if this disparity is because the
writer(s) don’t see the flimsiness of the distinction between outlaw and
criminal, or if it is just that it is being filtered through fairly unsophisticated characters that prefer to hew to more romantic notions about their place in the
world. Perhaps it is more the latter,
since Loy disabuses them of those notions by the end of the episode, forcing
them to bow to a new boss and serve as irregular soldiers in his war against the Italians. Said war boils over decisively with the episode-ending death of Doctor Senator, following an exchange of sadly lackluster monologues with
Calamita. The thing about an orphan baby
growing up into the scariest type of monster is not incoherent exactly, it’s
just…not all that chilling or compelling.
And Senator’s final jab about Constant and Gaetano being boys making messes was similarly
weak tea, feeling like he was groping for some kind of insult and that was just
the best he could muster on the spot. It
might be some sort of brilliantly realistic touch to depict these two gangsters trying
to verbally spar, but realizing their conflict is such that there isn’t all that
much for them to actually talk about. But if that was the idea, it comes out
looking too close to a writer just struggling to find anything particularly
inspired for two particular characters to say to each other.
In any case, with the first major casualty of conflict dropping
in unmistakable fashion, the war has commenced in earnest. If this episode didn’t represent Fargo
at its finest, it was still more good than bad on balance, and it ends by ringing in the parts where the series sings the most
reliably. And if Glynn Turman and the good Doctor will be missed in the weeks to come, there is still such a plethora of fascinating pieces on this board
that I remain eager to see what happens next.
This may not be our masterpiece, but it sure is Tarantino's.
Topics of conversation include Cristoph Waltz’s all-timer Nazi villain, the film’s crazy ‘five interrogations’ structure, what is achieved through Brad Pitt’s accent, other cinematic Nazis Tarantino may have taken his cues from, the ability of Mike Myers to disappear into a role, and lots more besides.
One of the most striking differences between Fargo the
series and the movie that inspired it is how the show has made a habit of
going outright paranormal, with the flying saucer in S2 and the purgatorial interlude
of S3. This is part of what made me say last week that I expected to see a dybbuk
this season. But I was still stunned to
see this episode prominently feature the walking dead. That is partly because the thing that haunts
Ephelrida and her aunt Zelmare in the episode is closer to your traditional movie
zombie than what the opening parable of the Coen’s A Serious Man posits as more
of an Exorcist-style possessing spirit, but one that inhabits dead bodies
rather than taking over living vessels. For reference:
But the surprise was even more heightened because in the case of those earlier seasons, the flights out fantasy didn’t come into play until toward the end. So even if I expected some sort of supernatural element to crop up, I never considered it would be in the first half of the run. Which is exciting, as is the fact that I still don’t feel like I completely understand everything the paranormal bits are supposed to add or represent to the story of this bizarre series. I don’t think I’m really supposed to admit that in this format, which is premised on a vague idea that I have a show sussed out so well that I can explain it to more casual viewers with some kind of authority. But I still struggle to articulate what was actually going on with the UFO or bowling alley, and I certainly can’t tell you what this zombie guy is all about at this juncture. But I'm comfortable taking the ride and hoping that things will become more clear as they go on. Or not even more clear, really, but more interesting and exciting, which are the areas the show has always delivered on.
But let’s get back to things we are sure about. The Cannons’ retribution for the attempted hit
on Lemuel and suspected hand in the stick-up from last week is to ambush a truckload of guns
with a ring of mediocre CGI, burn one unfortunate driver alive and brand Top
Goon Calamita with a hot gun barrel. It’s
a measured response, meant to allow just enough wiggle room to back off from all-out war if it turns out to have been the misunderstanding that Senator’s
meeting with Ebal confirms it to be. Loy
meanwhile dismisses the notion that the Italians could have been cunning enough
to hire two women of color to obscure their involvement in the robbery while simultaneously
sending two of their most well-known faces to fuck up the hit on Lemuel, with
the astute observation that “no one is dumb and smart at the same time.” I’m attempting to limit the amount of Trump
talk in these things, but this struck me as a nugget of wisdom that is
especially useful to keep in mind in this era when everyone who is at all
politically engaged (not least the man himself) seems to have convinced themselves
that because he won one very close, very weird election, he simply must
possess some sort of secret genius that allows him to see the secret designs of
the political world that are hidden to the naked eye. And it’s just an enormous coincidence that his
multidimensional chess game always looks so uncannily similar to what a big
giant idiot who only cared about his own immediate gratification might be doing
in the same situation.
But I digress. We may
know that his being on a television show about a mob war makes that mob war inevitable,
but from where Loy is standing it does not appear that the point of no return
has been crossed just yet. Which
explains why, while he fronts hard on Rabbi, he ultimately gears his efforts toward recruiting him than hurting him. Rabbi, for his part, sarcastically references the difference in their skin tones to make the point that however much the Italians might keep him apart, it wouldn't be any different if he tried jumping ship to a black family. And while I have a feeling the Cannons will eventually
come to regret not offing Calamita when they had the chance, I am fairly sure
this (relatively) gentle handling of Milligan will pay dividends down the line,
though I will confine predictions about the precise manner in a spoilery
section at the bottom.
In any case, Loy’s concern with securing his captive son’s safety before hostilities boil over completely contrasts notably with how no one on the Fadda side of the fence (except inside-outsider Rabbi) has spared a word of thought for how Gaetano’s attempt to start a war would have resulted in the painful death of their baby brother Zero even if it had succeeded. Which Josto points out, in a nicely effectual moment for a character that has to walk the line between being mostly comedic but also at least somewhat credible as a mob boss, it really did not. Gaetano’s plan was half-cocked to begin with, before he decided to double down on the risks by dragging Milligan into and Calamita overcomplicated it even further by playing coy about what they even wanted him to be doing. The upshot being, now the Faddas’ rivals have been upgraded to enemies, put on high alert, and have all the Family’s guns.
Loy’s plan for those guns is to exchange the bulk of them for
additional manpower from a crime boss in Fargo, one Mort Kellerman. We met Kellerman briefly back in Season 2, and
from that can surmise that he is likely to miss those men when he finds himself
shortly killed by the Gerhardts. Josto, for
his part, is looking to New York for out-of-town muscle, which all promises
an influx of bodies to drop in stylish whacking montages moving forward. But in the meantime, he is leaning on local
political connections to pressure the Cannons, starting with corrupt
ball-of-tics Odis. Odis is frankly not a
great character. I’m sure there is a
payoff to his obsessive knocking coming – maybe a sequence where he just needs
to sneak out of a door without alerting someone in the next room, or something –
but his collection of forced mannerisms somehow feels less real than Oraetta’s decades-long,
unmotivated murder spree.
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Oh yeah, Oraetta is a full-blown serial killer. And a prolific one, given the dozens of trophies and clippings Ephelrida finds in her very, very poorly secured murder closet. The killer nurse and her “special project” remain the biggest wild cards to account for, even as Oraetta insinuates herself with the Italians, while Ephelrida now holds the ring that can reveal her neighbor was the one that offed their patriarch, and Thurman’s unwitting attempt to pay off the Cannons with their own money have only drawn put the Smutneys further at the gangsters’ mercies. There’s an awful lot of hell to pay there, and I didn’t get around to mentioning how Josto is still looking to assassinate the hospital administrator, the outlaws are still in town, and marshal Deafy is still stomping around.
Plus there’s zombies.
Our podcast on QT's half of the ill-fated GRINDHOUSE experiment is live. And furthermore, we are now up on the Apple Podcasts and the iTunes Store, with Spotify and Google Podcast streams should be up within the next few days. Just be sure to search for Frame Work, which is the new name we concocted so John and I can continue yapping when we run out of Tarantino movies in a few weeks.
Pleasepleaseplease take a second to click on a rating, or better yet do a review. I'll be honest and say I'm not sure exactly how it helps, but every podcast I've ever heard insists that it really, really does.
FARGO the series has taken a lot of more ineffable qualities,
rather than direct plots or characters, from the Coen film on which it is “based”. There is the frigid Midwestern setting, the quirk, the contrasts between buffoonish venality
and plainspoken intelligence or vicious cruelty and stolid decency. What it has added, as befits the smaller-screen
but longer-form medium of television, is an enormous degree of sprawl to the storytelling
canvas. A season of FARGO numbers its
cast of named, significant characters in the dozens, and while prior seasons
have a remarkable level of patience and confidence when it comes to being able to quickly and effectively define the characters whenever the story gets around to them, last week’s
jumbo-sized premiere felt a bit overwhelming in how it threw half a dozen
bosses, henchmen, and children on either side of the gang war at us. And that is before getting to all the crooked cops, deranged nurses, escaped convicts, local politicians, and put
upon morticians. So as episode three settles in a bit, it gives us a little
more shading of players like Rabbi Milligan, Dr. Senator (Esquire), and Swanee,
while only introducing a single new character.
Or is it even fair to say that Timothy Olyphant playing a stiff-spined
marshal in a cowboy hat is a new character, when he’s already spent 10 of the last
20 years playing that type on both DEADWOOD and JUSTIFIED? I suppose the outspoken Mormonism of Dick “Deafy”
Wickware was enough to separate the role from Seth Bullock or Raylan Givens in
Olyphant’s eyes, but this is definitely the same wheelhouse. Which may be for the best, as putting a
cheerfully racist, deeply religious, carrot stick-chomping federal marshal in a
buddy cop scenario with an severely OCD, stuttering detective who is
compromised by the Italian mafia might risk being Just Too Much. But as it is, Olyphant’s lived-in facility with this particular type of lawman
grounding those interactions at least a little bit.
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| Honestly, he might be under some kind of court order at this point to never appear on screen without a badge and cowboy hat |
The fugitives he is chasing edge up against that “a little
too FARGO” line as well, to be honest.
It’s not that the semi-botched robbery is a terrible version of the show’s
signature felonious shenanigans, but it’s not the most inspired either. And while I love a good fart
joke, I…don’t, really? I'm not bothered by them exactly, but I can’t think of the last time I laughed
at one. Certainly not last week when Papa
Fadda teased a heart attack and let a big one rip instead. And the robbery doesn’t go entirely wrong enough to make a huge impression. The ladies still make off with a sizeable chunk of cash, and I was frankly surprised to
hear that three people had been killed afterward, as it wasn’t clear to me that anyone had actually been hit when they were popping off shots.
The entire episode was like that really. Not too shabby anywhere, but also not really the best version of any of the type of stuff FARGO generally does so well. The meeting of the families’ respective consiglieres, Senator and Ebal, is built around a showcase monologue about Senator’s experience at the Nuremberg Trials, and despite being delivered well it is rehashing thematic ideas that already feel well-established two weeks in, on top of being abundantly clear where it is going from the start. What was more interesting is the dynamic where both men are aware that their conflict is based on a lie, but also don’t even bother to litigate the believability of that lie, due to a mutual understanding of the underlying economic realities that compel the fight to continue regardless of its truth or falsity.
Meanwhile, Oraetta forces her way into the hoity-toity private
hospital, and then Josto’s car/pants. This is rather fun just on the basis of
Buckley and Schwartzman’s performances, and singing “Battle Hymn Of The
Republic” during the handjob is a hysterical (if nonconsensual) touch. But we are still clearly setting the table here,
and it feels a bit pointless to end the episode before the point where she
inevitably gets on board with his scheme to kill her new boss. And from there, it seems she will be his ace
in the hole when his supporters Ebal and Rabbi aren’t enough to directly
overcome the hold Gaetano is taking on the muscle side of the Family,
represented by chief enforcer Callamitta and the couple sad-sack flunkies he is
literally strong-arming onto his side in the bar.
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| "No, really, this will all end up great for you guys!!" |
At least, that is how things seem to be shaping up. But the best thing about FARGO is that there are always plenty of wildcards floating around to spin things off whatever rails have been laid out. Oraetta and the lesbian outlaws are the most obviously unstable elements here, but the one I have my eye on is Ben Wishaw’s Rabbi Milligan. His semi-spotlight is the one area where the episode does flirts with top-tier FARGOdom, as his unique backstory is highlighted and he is thrust into a compellingly horrible dilemma. But despite his tormented position, and that he successfully shuts down the assassination, we get less of sense of his interior and motivations than we’re invited to think. His actions may look fairly heroic on the surface, and his affection for Loy’s captive son seems genuine, but we aren’t given definitive indications as to whether his attempt to stop Gaetano from starting a war is born from altruism, actual loyalty to Josto, or just practicality (in that being the triggerman would make him a convenient, not-really-par-of-the-family scapegoat, should the Faddas decide to make up or that they want to deescalate with the Cannons after the fact). I am still wondering if Milligan is really going to be a Good Guy, or that impression is an optical illusion brought on by Wishaw’s sympathetic performance and proximity to monsters like Gaetano and Callamitta. If you recall the early going of season 2, Hanzee seemed pretty reasonable standing silently in the shadow of his crude, vicious boss, before revealing a vicious streak of his own when he stepped out.
But has FARGO reached a point, four seasons into its
lifespan, where it will repeat itself with that type of arc? My gut says no, but despite this being largely
a place-setter episode, I am still eager to find out. In any case, this is not a show that I mind spending
time with, even when it is idling in second gear.
COEN BINGO AND OTHER RANDOM STUFF
