Snow patrol: "Fargo"

We revisit Fargo 25 years on - yes, you're old; that's how time works - and in the wake of Noah Hawley's excellent TV spin-off. I remember enjoying the film very much as a snot-nosed kid, and then cooling on it over time, a consequence of my up-down relationship with subsequent Coen Brothers confections, and of retrospective doubts about the level of happenstance at play in the plotting. Hawley fixed that - filling in some of the more obvious blanks and elisions - over the ten hours of the TV Fargo's debut season; the film was, to some degree, a first draft. But what a first draft. To the postmodern formalism of Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, released the year before, the Coens responded with something more anecdotal: a shaggy-dog story about a story (cashstrapped husband has wife kidnapped, in order to pocket the ransom) that's so threadbare in its shagginess even its main players spend the opening scene poking holes in it. As a plan, this one's bound to fall apart sooner or later. The fun lies in how it all falls apart: messily, and in unusual, still-surprising directions, leaving one determined woman (Frances McDormand's pregnant patrolwoman Marge) to pick up the pieces. 25 years later, the plot looks less substantial than the characters, who were written and performed in such a way as to last; but then maybe this is the kind of plot only characters this bird-brained could have come up with. That would account for the movie's singularity, its cuckoo curlicues: those sidebars that would otherwise feel like eminently deletable subplots (cf. Marge and Mike), but which themselves speak to an entire community getting itself in unnecessary, potentially painful tangles.

We perhaps forget that the film followed in the wake of the Coens' first real flop, 1994's cherishable fantasia The Hudsucker Proxy, a Columbia-backed push for mainstream success that the Showcase crowd just didn't get, leaving it with no way of recouping its considerable budget. It's just possible that experience informed this one, given the moral Marge delivers late on ("There's more to life than a little money, ya know?"), but it's also clear that the Coens were learning how important it was to recruit a core of collaborators who were absolutely on their wavelength, to build worlds that both look and sound entirely of a piece. So: here's William H. Macy, another of the brothers' indelible portraits of Capitalist Man, squeezed on all sides, and finally reduced to pitiful yelps; here's McDormand, firm but fair, and on her way to her first Oscar; and pricelessly varied psychopathy from Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare, the one manic and jabbering, the other a mutely Frankenstinian monster, shambling through the snow. Carter Burwell came through with one of his most memorable scores, and while cinematographer Roger Deakins is largely subservient to the storytelling here, he keeps making sly, funny contributions: a track over an all-day buffet cart, an overhead of Buscemi turning circles in a parking lot that somehow mirrors the plotting, the revelation of just what's in the woodchipper. (He's also partially responsible for one of the best throwaway sight gags in all 90s cinema: the tufts of lining ejected from the characters' puffer jackets whenever they get shot.) I still reckon Hawley delivered the fuller, more satisfying iteration of this story: along with the Starz rethink of The Girlfriend Experience, his Fargo remains the foremost example of how US TV has surpassed US film in the years since. Yet I continue to marvel at how much the Coens packed into these 94 minutes; when they tried to top this themselves a decade later - with Burn After Reading, which ditched the melancholy for something more madcap - they came up weirdly short. Next up for this pair: The Big Lebowski, and something tells me people will still turn out for that when that turns 25 in two years' time.

Fargo returns to cinemas nationwide this Friday.