Monday, November 30, 2020

FARGO 4.11 - "STORIA AMERICANA"

 


Okay then?

The fourth season of Fargo will go down as its most disjointed, and generally least good, outing.  Which is a shame, because it may have had as many great pieces of performance and filmmaking as the prior seasons, none of which had to contend with a global pandemic forcing production to abruptly halt at an extremely inopportune juncture; when far too much had been completed to go back and try to redo things from scratch, but also there was no ending.  Not until one could be cobbled together several months later, under conditions that were still far from ideal and noticeably shifted away from the signature winter seasonality that defines the show even as it roams far in time and wide away from the titular town to explore the entire Great Plains. 

And if there is one thing this last episode feels, it is hasty.  It’s impossible to know how much of the season’s structural woes are directly attributable to the ‘rona, but that the finale is somehow the shortest episode of a season that had multiple entries pushing 90 minutes early on strikes me as something that just would not have happened in “normal” times.  Even if it is just an unfortunate coincidence, this season feels the affects of the pandemic, with key storylines and characters feeling forcibly distanced from each other to the story’s detriment, right through the end.

"This is my daughter.  Remember, she use to narrate this show?"

For instance, watching only the premiere and the finale, you would have expected that Ethelrida, Oraetta and Ebal were much more prominent throughout the season than they actually were.  But Ethelrida really did remarkably little outside of providing bookend voiceovers that literally open and close the season.  She uncovered Oraetta’s murders and wrote an anonymous letter to her boss, and then 5 or 6 episodes later told Loy. Which had the immediate effect of freeing her family from indentured servitude, for reasons that sure seemed a lot more self-evident to those characters than they did to me.  In any case, this is fine stuff to involve her in as far as it goes.  It just only goes far enough to fill maybe half a season, and the other half has this weird gap where the character that was set up as the main protagonist and moral center of the show should be. 

Her primary foil, Oraetta, only fares a little better.  She is set up to be a classic Fargo agent of chaos, and in the first couple episodes manages to kick off the gang war plotline by capriciously killing a mob boss, insinuate herself into an affair with his son, and attempt to simultaneously befriend and poison that (seeming) main protagonist and moral center whose family is entwined with the other side of the mob the war. That’s a lot to load up a plate with, on the first trip to the buffet.  Which just makes it feel weird when all of it quickly falls by the wayside so she can spend the rest of the season failing to poison her annoying boss, a subplot no one else on the show knows or cares about, only to submit to summary execution rather too meekly in the finale.  Compare that to all the shenanigans that Kirsten Dunst’s Peggy or David Thewlis’s Varga got up to throughout their respective seasons, and it just feels rather threadbare.  Both women needed to have more back and forth with each other or some other plotlines, in order to tie all the various strands tighter and to meet the level of performance Jessie Buckley and E’myri Crutchfield were bringing to bear on characters that got benched for such inexplicably long stretches. 

As for Ebal, he also looms larger than even I predicted when I said he would live to bring peace to the warring families in the end.  He does do this, but not by integrating th  much as forcibly assimilating the Cannon operation into the larger network of La Cosa Nostra.  This power play is fine in theory, as I have liked the performance from the start, and there are some ideas here befitting the more corporatist syndicate that will go on to make a lot of the same sort of moves on the Gerhardt family a couple decades down the line.  When the Fadda Family was actually a family made of criminal individuals, it made more sense that a rival clan like the Cannons could outmaneuver, outwit and potentially wipe them out.  But when Ebal embraces a “new way” of doing things for the New World, including the Faddas’ role as cogs in a larger, more inhuman machine, it quickly recasts the war from a tribal conflict into a hostile takeover of a commercial enterprise.  One where it doesn’t matter how many battles Loy wins, because the same tides will continue wash away any gains he makes sooner rather than later.  And as comfortable as Ebal looks sitting in that Big Chair that always dwarfed Josto and enjoying the full Godfather lighting effects, it still feels like a lot of the resolution is getting hung rather suddenly on a character that sat out the majority of the season.



On a related note, I can see how it is fitting that the final “battles” of the war that we see are these internecine executions of Josto and Happy undertaken by their own nominal allies. Thematically, this underlines the severing of familial loyalties for the new, more impersonal way of doing things and reinforces Josto’s graveside plea of how the American Dream is a trap where “they make you eat each other.”  But it also feels a touch anticlimactic, and not purposefully so.  More that the big finish they are aiming for is hobbled by the misallocation of resources that failed to make Happy, Leon, or Ebal as important to the body of the season as they are to this climax.


So what’s it all about in the end? Ethelrida’s narration that brings us in and takes us out of the season seems like it should be the Rosetta Stone to tell us what all this bloodshed and nonsense signifies, but her odd fade out of the story as it progresses really muddles that. The idea of Assimilation was hit heavy in the premiere voiceover, but in the finale the emphasis is on what History means to a nation of immigrants who are all bringing very different stories with them. When she asks whose history gets told, and emphasizes that this is her story in the finale, plays off the bit in Josto’s final plea where part of his case against the rigged game that is America is that “they make us forget” in a way that should be more resonant. If only the run of episodes leading up to it backed her declaration a bit more.




       COEN BINGO AND OTHER RANDOM STUFF

  • As nice as it was to see Bokeem Woodbine again (and as much genuine acting as he crammed into 30 wordless seconds), I wonder if it was even worth including the stinger scene.  I have to think that anyone that knew what to make of his appearance had already pieced together that connection, and probably would have been more excited about it if they felt it was a theory they had a hand in crafting themselves rather than something spoon fed by the show.
  • It terms of performances, I mentioned how Crutchfield and Buckley both did great despite languishing on the sidelines most of the season. Rock acquitted himself quite well to the most dramatic role he’s ever played, at least since New Jack City, but it was Schwartzman that ended up impressing me more in a role that I think presented a more delicate balance of silliness and caginess and petulance and menace to balance from moment to moment.  And I could have done with three more hours of a cat-and-mouse chase across the plains between Ben Wishaw’s Rabbi, Gaetano Bruno’s Calamita, and Corey Hendrix’s Omie Sparkman, as the latter two especially created intriguing characterizations out of minimal dialogue.
  • I thought Josto's final walk to the grave was going to start evoking Bernie Bernbaum's walk into the titular woods in Miller's Crossing much more directly than it ended up doing.  Glad they didn't just have Schwartzman aping it directly, because that comparison couldn't do any favors.
  • The oranges felt like a rather on-the-nose Godfather reference.  Oh yeah, Loy got shivved by a vengeful Zelmaire just as he accepted that his family could be safer and happier without the criminal clout he had been chasing. I probably should have mentioned that more directly, but it feels a bit obligatory by the point it happens.

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