Keith: Joel and Ethan Coen have talked about letting the story take them where they will when writing screenplays, but Fargo is a pretty tightly constructed film. (And, really, even the Coens’ more ramshackle films feel pretty thoughtfully put together.) Yet there’s one scene that doesn’t seem to serve the plot: Marge’s awkward reunion with her old high-school acquaintance Mike Yanagita (Steve Park). In fact, Googling the name “Mike Yanagita” leads to results like “What significance does Mike Yanagita have in Fargo?” and “Can anyone explain the significance of the Mike Yanagita scene in Fargo?” I haven’t visited those pages and I’m not sure what conclusions they draw, but the scene used to puzzle me too. Then it hit me that the scene doesn’t serve the mystery at all, but it does serve a parallel story, in which Marge faces an enormous life change with the arrival of her child, and questions whether she’s made the right decisions.
Marge is a great detective: fast, instinctive, and canny. She uses the codes of Minnesota nice to cut through Jerry’s defenses, and follows clues that others miss. So what’s she doing in small-town Brainerd, Minnesota? In some respects, settling. Fargo is above all a story of greed and discontent, a film filled with characters who always want more than they have, and will do what it takes to get it. Marge isn’t one of those people, but that doesn’t mean she’s immune to the same instincts. Note this: She never tells her husband she’s meeting Mike. Note, too: She makes herself up for their meeting, checking her hair as she walks in the door, and looking nervous in a way she never does when interviewing suspects or chasing down bad guys. I’m not suggesting she enters the restaurant prepared to embark on a torrid affair with Mike, but she at least wants to keep the meeting to herself, maybe just to contemplate paths not taken while reconnecting with someone who left Brainerd for the (relatively) big city.
To me, the cracks in Marge’s saintliness make Fargo a richer movie. She’s been touched by the urge to want what she doesn’t have, which makes her “…and it’s a beautiful day” speech more than a lecture she delivers to a bad guy: It’s something she’s telling herself. Ditto the final moments when she tells her husband, almost as if remembering it, “We’re doin’ pretty good” as they consider what lies ahead in just two months. Fargo is a crime story, but there’s another, more personal story playing out in the background.
