Are ‘Fargo’ and ‘No Country for Old Men’ linked?
Filmmakers are allowed to return to the same themes repeatedly over the course of their careers, something the Coen brothers have used to become modern greats. Like many of their movies, Fargo and No Country for Old Men deal with good and evil, greed, and corruption as it applies to middle America, but the connections run a little deeper than that.
The former finds Frances McDormand on Academy Award-winning form as Marge Gunderson, a pregnant Minnesota police chief investigating a triple murder after William H. Macy’s car salesman enlists a pair of criminals to kidnap his wife and extract a substantial ransom fee from her wealthy far. Needless to say, things do not go off without a hitch.
Meanwhile, the adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name finds Javier Bardem on Academy Award-winning form as the sadistic Anton Chigurh, who leaves behind a bloody trail of destruction after Josh Brolin’s Llewelyn Moss steals the cash from a drug deal and heads off on the run, with Tommy Lee Jones’ veteran lawman the third wheel and thorn in the side of both. Needless to say, things do not go off without a hitch, either.
As tends to be the case with the Coens, though, who or what constitutes good and evil isn’t black and white. Technically, Macy’s Jerry Lundergaard isn’t a bad guy; he’s just trying to aid his financial situation with a cack-handed plan that sounds a lot better on paper than it does in practice once the shit hits the fan.
Brolin’s Moss is far from being despicable, too, but the commonality between them is that their lives get upended for the worst when they allow their greed to get the better of them. Through the Coen lens, it’s simply human nature that people would be drawn towards instant wealth. That’s hardly a fantastical concept because there are a lot of folks out there who’d benefit immeasurably from a hefty windfall.
In both, the authorities are depicted as trying to bring order to a situation of self-made chaos. In Fargo, Marge is the straight-shooter who struggles to deal with the spiralling fallout from Jerry’s one catastrophic decision, while in No Country for Old Men, it’s Jones’ by-the-book Ed Tom Bell placed in the middle of the increasingly inevitable showdown between Moss and Chigurh.
Neither Jerry nor Moss is a particularly honest sort, but it’s hard to say their heart is in the wrong place. The former needs to keep his business alive to provide for his family and the latter’s eyes bulge out of his head when the chance presents itself for him to immediately solve his own financial situation.
That’s not to say there are any direct connections between the two that place them as unfolding in the same universe, other than the briefcase from Fargo reappearing as the briefcase in No Country for Old Men to continue the Coens’ penchant for having one item signify that it’s a very bad omen to put a vast sum of cash in that exact make and model, but in a broader sense they can be seen as two very different peas from an equally dark and dingy pod.
