Minnesotans Don’t Appreciate ‘Fargo’ Humor
No one applauded inside a suburban Minneapolis theater after a recent matinee of “Fargo,” the latest film from the Minnesota natives Joel and Ethan Coen.
The house lights went up to reveal only six customers, all looking as slack-jawed and appalled as the audience watching “Springtime for Hitler” in Mel Brooks’s film “The Producers.”
“Well, that was different,” muttered an elderly man heading for the exit, issuing the epithet Minnesotans use when they most wish to damn.
Across the state the verdict was the same: the Coen brothers were quislings for portraying Minnesota as a tundra inhabited by slow-witted doofuses.
In the rest of the country, meanwhile, “Fargo” was a hit, earning ecstatic notices from both critics and a public charmed by the Coens’ bent take on their homeland.
Reports from New York and Los Angeles had it that Scandinavianinflected Minnesota-isms like “Yah, sure” and “You betcha,” repeated mantralike in the movie, had now entered the cocktail-party vernacular.
Many Minnesotans, however, were infuriated by “Fargo” characters who never say “Yes” when “Yer darn tootin’!” will do. And not everyone here was laughing when the film’s heroine, a rural sheriff named Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand), politely dresses down an uncooperative suspect with “You have no call to get snippy with me!”
Still, the Coens can’t be faulted on their research. Actors were coached on the “Fargo” set with copies of “How to Speak Minnesotan,” a wry guide to local tongues written by Howard Mohr.
The book, which delineates with Talmudic precision the difference between a “darn good” deal and a “heckuva” deal, was also passed out at a party celebrating the film’s New York premiere.
Mohr recently said that all he’s ever asked these days is “What did you think of ‘Fargo’?” (Here ya go then: he hasn’t seen it.)
KSTP, a Twin Cities talk-radio station recently devoted two hours solely to a debate on the film’s merits; the phone banks lighted up with callers like Ralph from rural Fergus Falls who declared: “I left that movie feeling violated and lied about. The Coens should be ashamed.”
Minnesota’s pain proved to be its neighbor states’ pleasure. “Minnesotans can dish it out, but they can’t take it,” said a caller named Terry from Wisconsin Rapids, Wis. “They’ve been calling us ignorant cheeseheads for years, and now it’s coming back to them in ‘Fargo.’ “
Calvin Trillin once termed this kind of Midwestern sensitivity “rubeo-phobia” - the paranoia of common folk who believe the world regards them as hicks. Yet even Minnesota’s most worldly-wise seemed to take offense at “Fargo.”
One of the most surprising thumbs down came from Garrison Keillor, who was himself pilloried for years by locals who believe that he cashed in on Minnesota by presenting Lake Wobegon as a land of village idiots.
“Fargo,” Keillor intoned last month during a broadcast of “A Prairie Home Companion,” “was a strange movie.”
“Watching it was like driving toward Bismarck, N.D., at 10 miles an hour,” he added. “You had a lot of time to see where you were going - and wishing you didn’t have to.”
Meantime, The Minneapolis Star Tribune warned filmgoers that “many Minnesotans may be offended by parts of ‘Fargo.’ ” The newspaper also investigated whether the Coens’ claim that the film was based on an actual Minnesota kidnapping and murder case was true. (So then: It wasn’t.)