by Donna Burgess

Created on: December 28, 2008

Joel and Ethan Coen, better known to movie lovers as The Coen Brothers, have been tickling audiences' funny bones and chilling their blood for over two decades. From the hilarious Raising Arizona to the cult classic The Big Lebowski, the duo has set the pace in American filmmaking. Two of their most successful and most acclaimed films are Fargo (Coen, E. and Coen, J. 1996) and No Country for Old Men (McCarthy, C., Coen, E. and Coen, J. 2007). Both films are very similar to one another with their unassuming and likable heroes (or heroines), sociopath antagonists, and bleak American landscapes. However, despite their likenesses, Fargo's

darkly humorous plot and a overall positive feeling of closure contrasts sharply with No Country's intense drama and gloomy climatic outlook.

Fargo gives the viewer the ever-woman, no-nonsense Marge Gunderson (played brilliantly by Frances McDormand), a seven months pregnant small town police chief, who unravels a chain of events that lead her to a false kidnapping. Marge serves as a balance between the wild and the tame in this tale and gives the viewer a character both likable and easy in which to relate. She provides the moral backbone to counteract the often violent, yet darkly humorous plot of the movie.

Equally likable and sympathetic for is No Country for Old Men's bedraggled local Sheriff Tom Bell (played by equally bedraggled Tommy Lee Jones). Bell discovers a trail of murders that brings him to a man named Llewelyn Moss, who had accidentally stumbles upon a drug deal turned sour, and discovers half-dozen dead men along with bag containing more than two million dollars in drug money.
Here again, a law enforcement officer serves as the moral backbone of this story, as Bell in turn attempts to protect the Moss and his wife from violent hitman, Anton Chigurh, (who is hired to retrieve the satchel and eliminate the man who found it) and find Chigurh himself.

The Coens' are famous for making their backdrops as important to the story as the characters are. Fargo's setting is the stark and snowy wastelands of the upper Midwest. Here they use stereotypical regional characters, from their quirky mannerisms to their exaggerated accents to create a memorable version of that area.

No Country's
backdrop was the barren borderlands of rural Texas, along the United States and Mexican border, circa 1980. Again, the regional stereotypes and accents come into play, however here more subtly. Jones' character is the atypical Texan lawman, complete

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>