Fargo and Its Place in Retro Revival

By Andrew Jupin, Senior Programmer

A few weeks back, a colleague asked me why I’d select a film like Fargo to be part of Retro Revival. The track record for the series so far had been, as they saw it, “old” movies—It Happened One Night (1934), I Knew Her Well (1965), Band of Outsiders (1964), and so on—so how could something like Fargo qualify? I quickly reminded my colleague that Fargo was released in 1996 and that that was, somehow, already twenty years ago. When I teach the film now to my Intro to Cinema classes, the majority of the students weren’t even born when the film was released. (They also think I’m about to show them episodes of the FX television show of the same name.) So whether we want to admit it or not, Fargo certainly qualifies for Retro Revival…

But I think that disbelief in its age is also a real testament to the film’s timelessness and the work of the Coen Brothers in general. Fargo, the Coens’ sixth feature after other classics such as Blood Simple (1984) and Raising Arizona (1987), is probably one of their best remembered films this side of The Big Lebowski (1998), and is certainly, in this curator’s opinion, one of the best films of the 1990s. As a matter of fact, if you were to have me make a big list of “Best Films of the 90s” qualifiers, the Coens would pop up quite a bit. Sorry, Quentin Tarantino, but hey, I’d definitely have Jackie Brown on there for what it’s worth.

Fargo has everything the Coens do well—an incredibly sharp and funny script, fantastically memorable characters portrayed by immensely talented character actors (the Coens rarely populate their films with “big” stars), and a perfect balance of light and dark tones; for as brutally violent as Fargo is, it’s also hysterically funny, a feat not easy to pull off in cinema.

If those weren’t reasons enough to qualify Fargo for Retro Revival, we’ll also be presenting it in a new 4K DCP made to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the film’s release. So it’s the same brilliant film, looking the best it’s been seen in two decades.

Two decades. That’s officially an “old” movie. Not It Happened One Night old, but Retro Revival old. If you don’t believe me, come to the screening and check out the cordless phone William H. Macy uses to place a call after his wife is “kidnapped.” It’s an old movie.

Fargo screens on Wednesday, Dec. 14 at 1:00 and 7:35. Tickets are on sale here.