Television Review: Noah Hawley’s “Fargo” is both old and new in its bluesy third season.
Spoilers ahead. Aw, jeez.
Noble men and women of the law. Greedy, idiotic criminal types who are in way over their heads. An icy Minnesota milieu. Pitiless black comedy interrupted by blasts of gruesome violence and wistful directorial formalism.
These are the basic ingredients that have comprised all three seasons of Noah Hawley’s mostly excellent crime anthology “Fargo.” It’s been a winning recipe so far, with both audiences and critics singing the show’s praises after its first and (stupendous) second season. When this aforementioned formula has worked to the creator’s advantage with such consistency, it would be understandable that they would be hesitant to tamper with it.
If the first chapter of “Fargo’s” third season is any indication, Hawley doesn’t seem too eager to alter the show’s winning recipe. This is still a chilly, chilling world of “aw, jeezes” and “you betcha’s,” where awful things happen to decent people, and there’s always a 70’s soft-rock ballad you can utilize to soundtrack a scene of unimaginable brutality. Those who are already on board with Hawley’s idiosyncratic spinoff of Joel and Ethan Coen’s classic 1996 film aren’t going to find anything in “The Law of Vacant Places,” the third season’s first installment, that’s going to change their minds.
That said, there is a familiarity to this new season of “Fargo” that’s both comforting and also a little frustrating. After Hawley took such a masterful gamble in the show’s second season — winding the clock back three decades and trading the first season’s blood-spattered neo-noir/cringe comedy for a full-bore Midwestern gangster epic — it seems that, with season three, he’s treading back into more safer and more predictable waters, giving fans more of exactly what they want.
This isn’t actually a bad thing, since Hawley has proven to be very good at this sort of thing. The novelist-turned-showrunner’s very peculiar gift seems to be that he can take properties that really shouldn’t work on paper, before finding a very clever, very modern way to make them fresh again. Hawley has also cajoled some very fine actors (Ewan McGregor, um, Ewan McGregor, Mary-Elizabeth Winstead, Carrie Coon, and David Thewlis, among others) to join him for this new gory campfire tale, and although “The Law of Vacant Returns” isn’t the funniest or most thrilling episode of “Fargo” to date, it does admittedly set an unsettling and absorbing precedent for what’s to come.
Season two of Hawley’s show reveled in the details of its period: the garish, lapel-collared shirts, curious political ideologies and 70’s funk and soul soundtrack all got a workout, lending the proceedings a mood that was both more buoyant than its first season, and somehow, more melancholy. If “The Law of Vacant Places” is any indication of what the tone and tenor of “Fargo’s” third season will be like, the answer is: dark. Like, darker than this show normally dares to be. There’s a sour air of resentment and free-floating malice between the characters in Hawley’s new iteration of the “Fargo” mythology: one that makes the requisite explosions of violence near the episode’s end feel appropriately justified. Even this season’s trademark Good-Hearted Cop — Carrie Coon’s Gloria Burgle, a divorced single mom who’s a clear descendant of Frances McDormand’s unthinkably benevolent Marge Gunderson, right down to the snowhat and the funny last name — exists mostly on the fringes of the story, at least so far. The third season of this acclaimed and popular show is shaping up to be another star-studded bloodbath and though there were a few moments where it felt as though the creators were stylishly spinning their wheels, it’s mostly just a pleasure to get lost in this world once again. For that reason and more, “Fargo” fans have every reason to rejoice.
Much has been made of this season’s stunt casting of Ewan McGregor, here (mostly) shedding his distinct Scottish brogue to play brothers Ray and Emmit Stussy. The oily Emmit is a modern-day American success story. He’s the “parking lot king of Minnesota”: a can-do go-getter who got his start by selling a lucrative set of vintage stamps that once belonged to his father. Somewhat understandably, the more bellicose Ray — a balding, pot-bellied P.O. who’s shtupping one of his parolees, a tall drink of water named Nikki Swango (Winstead) — doesn’t feel to hot about bearing the brunt of Emmit’s good fortune. In fact, Ray feels that the bygone prized stamp collection belonged as much to him as it did to his brother.
Of course, retrieving the stamps won’t be easy. Emmit is wealthy and protected, a paragon of his community. His money man, a stammering fussbucket named Sy Feltz (Michael Stuhlbarg, naturally), is with him at all times: a kind of faux-bodyguard with the least intimidating mustache you’ll ever see on a man. Still, Ray, deluded bastard that he is, sees green pastures on the horizon. In spite of the fact that the less reputable Stussy brother drives a wheezing old bucket of a car that probably hasn’t passed a smog test since the 80’s — not to mention the fact that his only friend is a perpetually stoned petty thief, Maurice (Scoot McNairy, stealing the episode and almost not giving it back) — the sad son of a bitch still dreams of a life of domestic bliss with his girl Nikki. Obviously, in order to buy her what he calls a “real fancy-like” ring, he’ll need some cash. He’ll need to go to his brother.
Of course, when I say Ray “goes to his brother,” I don’t mean he politely knocks on his door and invites himself in for tea and toast. Kind gestures like this are rare in the world of “Fargo” and if they occur, they are usually followed by an act of irreversible savagery. Ray, for whatever reason, ensnares the thick-headed Maurice in his nefarious plot; why he thinks this addle-brained stoner could pull off a scheme like this only speaks to the tragically short-sighted outlook of the show’s central characters.
Ray’s plot? Bust into Emmit’s home and retrieve the elusive Stussy family stamp collection. To say that this plan doesn’t exactly go off without a hitch isn’t giving anything away — fatal instances of trial and error are what this show is based around. As it turns out, Emmit, unbeknownst to Ray, is in some hot water of his own. We come to learn that a couple years back, the more reputable Stussy brother took out a loan with some very unscrupulous white-collar criminal types. Now that Emmit’s keen on paying back the interest … well, it seems his benefactors (personified by a terrifying British goon with rotting teeth, played to the hilt by a brilliant David Thewlis) have other ideas about that.
Emmit’s standoff with Thewlis’s sniveling devil, endowed with the very Coenesque moniker of V.M. Varga, accounts for the episode’s single most compelling sequence: a tense, controlled mano-a-mano standoff that takes place in an empty high-rise office complex after dark. The show personifies everything that makes “Fargo” such a treasure to indulge in every week: Hawley’s wandering, gorgeously eloquent homespun soliloquies, Thewlis delivering his lines like a receptionist in Satan’s waiting room, a control of form and tone that you normally only find in arthouse cinema. If the entirety of “The Law of Vacant Places” had been as riveting as this individual scene, we might be looking at the best season of “Fargo” yet.
Alas, it is not: “The Law of Vacant Places” is a gripping but weirdly repetitive hour of television that signifies some of “Fargo’s” biggest strengths along with its inescapable flaws. I could be proved wrong about this halfway through the season, but I found the first episode’s prologue —a bizarre teaser set in a hostage negotiation quarters in 1980’s Berlin — evocative and yet completely unrelated to the larger world of Hawley’s show. For a second, I thought I was watching “The Americans”. Of course, “Fargo” has done this before: season two kicked off with a bizarre behind-the-scenes lark preface that tied into that particular story’s larger themes about green in Ronald Reagan’s America. I’ll be impressed if Hawley can connect the dots between his baffling preamble here and the rest of season three, but I wouldn’t be surprised if he manages to do so. Hawley, who wrote and directed “The Law of Vacant Places,” has showed on both “Fargo” and his pyschedelic superhero show “Legion” that he can pull off these kind of narrative magic tricks with relative ease. In any case, I’m sure it’s going to take a lot of maple glazes and grisly executions to get to the answer.
McGregor obviously has a tough task playing these dueling scumbags, though, to his immense credit, he manages to locate the buried soul of each Stussy brother. His portrait of Ray is particularly moving, noticeably in a weirdly gorgeous montage set to vintage soul that personifies Ray’s dreary existence as an endless series of piss tests and dime-store coffee jaunts. It’s the kind of seamless visual storytelling “Fargo” is known for, but it wouldn’t mean a damn thing if McGregor weren’t all the way in, and he is. Ditto for Coon, whose inherent sense of decency goes a long way towards selling the character when Hawley threatens to lean too hard on Marge Gunderson callbacks from the Coen’s original film.
Aside from Thewlis, who is looking to be this season’s equivalent of Bokeem Woodbine in season two, my favorites in the cast were Mary-Elizabeth Winstead and Scoot McNairy. Winstead is a marvelous performer who too often gets cast in apathetic “cool girl” parts in independent movies: the kind of Zooey Deschanel-esque roles dreamt up by white male screenwriters exercising a certain kind of wish fulfillment. But Nikki Swango is a screwball and a live wire and, as revealed in the show’s final moments, just as capable of evil as anyone in this unforgiving universe. Mr. McNairy, meanwhile, takes what could just be a throwaway part in a less interesting drama and fills it with telling, lived-in details, like how the character mimes licking a stamp when Ray tells him what he’ll be retrieving, or the almost sexual joy he seems to take in smoking a cigarette after a night at the bar. I’ve always been a big fan of McNairy’s, but he’s a very peculiar, specific actor, and I’m thrilled to see that Hawley has recognized his gifts and tailored him a small (but crucial) part in this whole heartless Middle American burlesque.
As always, Hawley’s dialogue sings when it’s delivered by great actors. Lucky for us, this season season is flush with them. Like “True Detective’s” Nic Pizzolatto, Hawley has a background in novels, and like Pizzolatto, he likes to give his actors long, wordy monologues in which they swap stories, threats and musings in a kind of grandiloquent, beautifully composed vernacular that sounds just a few shades removed from real conversation. Still, season three feels like it is deliberately revisiting the territory explored in the Coen’s original film — moreso than previous seasons of the show.
Part of this could be because the show itself has become more contemporary. Hawley has hinted that this season will incorporate elements of social media and our current “selfie-obsessed culture” into its corpse-strewn narrative: an intriguing prospect if ever there was one. And yet, one of the liberties afforded to anthology shows like “Fargo” is that they can theoretically afford to take big risks without alienating their fanbase. As good as this new season of “Fargo” is shaping up to be, there’s also a part of me that wishes that Hawley and his writers didn’t seem so dead-set on paying fan service to their idols when they could be carving out a compelling story that stands on its own two feet.
Still, this is “Fargo”: one of the smartest, weirdest, and most consistently well-made dramas on T.V. at the moment. I suppose it isn’t fair to judge this new season against the standard of its last, which rivals the best seasons of “Breaking Bad” for characterization, world-building and pure thrills. The fact that “Fargo” is more engaging than 90% of what’s on network T.V. even when it’s spinning its wheels, speaks to just how good this show has gotten since it premiered in 2014. This world of cold weather and colder hearts is like a small-screen ecosystem of seemingly normal people behaving like depraved animals and I, for one, can’t stay out of the jungle. Though it doesn’t quite charge out of the gate with the same clarity of purpose as it did in previous seasons, “Fargo” is still back in all our lives, and that reader, is very much a good thing.
Grade: “The Law of Vacant Places,” B.
