Having seen this film some years ago I used to think it was really good. I watched it again last night, and decided it was actually pretty messy and nasty. Nearly all the characters, with Marge and the bit parts excepted, are unusually unpleasant. The Coens seem not to have enjoyed growing up in Scandinavian America, and have taken revenge on the place. Is it populated almost entirely by dolts, scammers, thugs, bullies, hookers, wimps and so on ? According to the extra feature "Minnesota Nice" there is an underlying feeling that "polite cultures are the most repressed and therefore the most violent". The Coens put it that way, in any case. In other respects the whole set-up reminded me a little of Blue Velvet country, ten years earlier.

The film kicks off with three unplanned killings of innocent people, and then adds to these with three or four more. It would spoil things were I to list them. Marge, who is a pregnant policewoman, then forces a solution to what is going on and arrests the surviving guilty party. She tells him it's a beautiful day. It isn't in fact, since it's foggy and snowy. She ends up in bed with her signally lumpy husband, and tells him he's wonderful. The two of them spend a lot of time stuffing their mouths. There is a curious incident with a mentally disturbed Japanese man. I don't quite know what that's about. The net result is faintly comic, in an ugly sort of way, if you think all the deaths are funny. $1 million, less $80,000, is buried and lost in the snow.