Fargo

“Fargo” begins with an absolutely dead-on familiarity with smalltown life in the frigid winter landscape of Minnesota and North Dakota.

Then it rotates its story through satire, comedy, suspense and violence, until it emerges as one of the best films I've ever seen.

To watch it is to experience steadily mounting delight, as you realize the filmmakers have taken enormous risks, gotten away with them and made a movie that is completely original, and as familiar as an old shoe - or a rubbersoled hunting boot from Land's End, more likely.

The film is “based on a true story” that took place in Minnesota in 1987. It has been filmed on location, there and in North Dakota, by the Coen brothers, Ethan and Joel, who grew up in St.

Louis Park, a suburb of Minneapolis, and went on to make good movies like “Blood Simple,” “Miller's Crossing” and “Barton Fink,” but never before a film as wonderful as this one, shot in their own backyard.

To describe the plot is to risk spoiling its surprises. I will tread carefully. A car salesman named Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) desperately needs money for a business deal - a parking lot scheme that can save him from bankruptcy. He is under the thumb of his rich father-in-law (Harve Presnell), who owns the car agency and treats him like a loser. Jerry hires a couple of scrawny lowlifes named Showalter and Grimsrud (Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare) to kidnap his wife (Kristin Rudrud) and promises to split an $80,000 ransom with them. Simple enough, except that everything goes wrong in completely unanticipated ways, as the plot twists and turns and makes a mockery of all of Jerry's best thinking.

Showalter is nervous, sweaty, talkative, mousy. Grimsrud is a sullen slug of few words. During the course of the kidnapping, he unexpectedly kills some people (“Oh, daddy!” says Showalter, terrified).

The bodies are found the next morning, frozen beside the highway, in the barren lands between Minneapolis and Brainerd, Minn., which is, as we are reminded every time we see the hulking statue outside town, the home of Paul Bunyan.

Brainerd's police chief is a pregnant woman named Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand). She talks like one of the MacKenzie brothers, in a Canadian-American-Scandivanian accent that's strong on cheerful folksiness. Everybody in the movie talks like that, with lines like “you're dern tootin'.” When she gets to the big city, she starts looking for a place with a good buffet.

Marge Gunderson might need a jump to get her patrol car started in the morning, but she is a gifted cop. Soon after visiting the murder site, she reconstructs the crime - correctly. Eyewitnesses place two suspects in a tan Ciera. She traces it back to Jerry Lundegaard's lot. “I'm a police officer from up Brainerd,” she tells him, “investigating some malfeasance.” Jerry, brilliantly played by Macy, is a man weighed down by the insoluble complexities of the situation he has fumbled himself into. He is so incompetent at crime that, when the kidnapping becomes unnecessary, he can't call off the kidnappers, because he doesn't know their phone number. He's being pestered with persistent calls from General Motors, inquiring about the illegible serial number on the paperwork for the same missing tan Ciera. He tries sending faxes in which the number is smudged. GM isn't fooled. Macy creates the unbearable agony of a man who needs to think fast, and whose brain is scrambled with fear, guilt and the crazy illusion that he can somehow still pull this thing off.