FARGO 4.05 - "THE BIRTHPLACE OF CIVILIZATION"

 

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.  

"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.

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.

 

COEN BINGO AND OTHER RANDOM SHIT

• I'm not sure if we are supposed to believe that Thurman is actually Ethelrida’s biological father?  I'm not geneticist and I don't think this type of science is all that exact anyway, but it seems odd if her fairly light-skinned mother coupled with one of the pastiest men in Missouri and produced a child with a notably darker complexion.  But it could also just be that they wanted to cast a particular actress, so they did.

• I feel like the one piece of Odis’s backstory that was still withheld from us was a bit about how pappa Fadda helped serve vigilante justice on the killer of his fiancée, which led to his indentured servitude to the Family.

• I am going to take Senator specifically endorsing his mutual respect with Ebal before he checked out as further proof that the Italian consigliere will survive to take up that role in the more blended crime family at the end of that season. 

• Ethelrida asks “What’s the rumpus?” upon being called to the principle's office (again), which was a favored query of Tom Reagan in Miller's Crossing.

• Kellerman takes his guns north on a truck bearing the logo of Treehorn Landscaping, which presumably treats objects like women, man.

• We could have really used some of Oraetta’s murderous eccentricity to add some wildcard spice to the spaces between monologues in this episode.  Or maybe a quick zombie attack.

• In all my griping, I didn't even mention my favorite scene of the episode, where Rabbi tutors Satchel in long division and Josto in gangland politics simultaneously.  The way it subtly frames Josto as a child, wearing his pajamas and having to end the scene to take a potty break is nice, and the dialogue about the weird pride people take in being bad at math, or how "making me say it isn't going to make it any easier" to order his brother whacked is stronger than in any of the monologues I panned.