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COPYRIGHT 2003 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
The kidnap victim is lying dead on the kitchen floor. The murderer is out back, feeding his accomplice's body into a wood-chipper. Slowly, crunching through the snow, the police officer comes around the house. She is a woman, and she is hugely pregnant. "Police!"she yells. "Hands up! Police!"The killer doesn't hear her. The wood-chipper is making too much noise. Finally, he turns around, and she, thinking--though she is aiming a large firearm at him--that perhaps he hasn't understood, takes one hand off the gun and points to the police medallion on her cap. He gets the message, and runs. She shoots, and brings him down. The scene ends with a long shot of this dark, busy creature running through a frozen whiteness to collar her man.
The movie is "Fargo"(1996), by Joel and Ethan Coen, and the officer--Marge Gunderson, the chief of the Brainerd, Minnesota, police--is Frances McDormand. The jokes--the pregnant cop, pointing helpfully to her medallion as she faces a psychopathic killer--are typical of the Coen brothers, whose movies often tell of a nasty crime breaking through the surface of a comically normal world, and treat the crime as wittily as they treat the world. That's what has made the Coens controversial: unlike Hollywood product, their films usually have no clear moral center. But, in "Fargo,"the Coens supplied such a standard, in the person of Marge. Lest we miss this fact, she is given a small speech, as she drives the miscreant to the station. He has killed five people, she says. "And for what? For a little bit of money. There's more to life than a little money, you know. Don't you know that? And here you are, and it's a beautiful day. Well, I just don't understand it."Apart from Marge, only a Sunday-school teacher could have delivered this homily. The Coens mean us to take it seriously, though, and that is probably why "Fargo,"alone among their films, gained a large popular following, and Hollywood's blessing. They won an Academy Award for the screenplay. But they couldn't have made "Fargo"the hit it was without McDormand, who won the best-actress award.
That prize, as McDormand suggested in her acceptance speech, was a gift not just to her but to all women in the movie industry, for it seemed to say that an unglamorous woman, playing an unsexy role, could still be a star, by dint of good acting. This week, a new movie is being released--Lisa Cholodenko's "Laurel Canyon”--in which McDormand, at forty-five, at last plays a glamorous role, that of a rock-music producer, and she is sexy in it. She even has a nude scene, and a cute rock-star boyfriend. But this is not her usual sort of project.
When McDormand consents to see a journalist, she will generally make the appointment not at Le Cirque but at the Fairway Cafe, a noisy eatery above the popular New York grocery store. If she is on location, she will meet her interviewer in any old dusty corner she can find, and bring a sandwich. "I'm gonna eat lunch and talk at the same time,"she once announced to a surprised interviewer in Dublin. "So what do you wanna know?"After a first session at Fairway, my conversations with her took place in a handsome penthouse, with a river view, that she maintains for business meetings and houseguests above the apartment she lives in, with her husband, Joel Coen, and their eight-year-old son, Pedro, on the Upper West Side. Still, I saw the sandwiches, twice. As for the woman eating them, she wears no makeup, and her blond hair is pulled back in a messy ponytail. She dresses in jerseys and jeans. She smokes; she cracks jokes. She is simple and direct. Her face is beautiful but severe--long and planar. It is like one of those pointy-chinned faces--the merchant's wife, the burgher's daughter--that stare out at you from old Flemish paintings. This physiognomy, together with her no-nonsense manner, has won McDormand many unseductive roles: nuns ("Crimewave,""Madeline”), browbeaten wives ("Blood Simple,""Mississippi Burning”), put-upon girlfriends ("Wonder Boys,""City by the Sea”), widowed mothers ("Almost Famous”), wise doctors ("Paradise Road,""Primal Fear”), sad lesbians ("Talk of Angels,""The Butcher's Wife”). She casts a movie-star spell all the same. She tells me that, since "Fargo,"strangers stop her on the street and try out their Minnesota accents on her. "You betcha!"they shout. She can't stand this. Why don't they leave her alone? She thinks it's because the character of Marge was so "nice,"so approachable. I think it's because of her face. As...
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