Fargo opens with the message that it is "based on a true story," and closes with a retraction that its "persons and events" are fictional. "True story" is a joshing dramatic contraption, obliquely causing us to accept certain elements we might not normally accept so easily. Regardless, Fargo is concordant with the intonations and distinctions of modern small-town life. When Chief Marge Gunderson stands at the first crime scene and counts three dead bodies, she accurately recognizes that the culprits are not from Brainerd. Endeavoring into the city on her inquest, she asks a friend for a tip on a good place to eat, and is guided to the Radisson buffet. Jerry Lundegaard is as boxed in by his sales manager's job and his cruel father-in-law as any inmate in a jail cell. He's shuffling a stolen car and a double fraud. His son hurtles off from the dinner table to meet his friends at McDonald's. His wife toils manically at every domestic chore, chopping, stirring and knitting with as much rapidity as she's capable of. Against these homegrown nuances, the crimes protrude as brutal and barbaric. There are unpleasant parts. Everyone recalls the scene with the wood-chipper. More cold-blooded is the scene where the poor hostage, blindfolded and barefoot, attempts to escape on foot in the snow, and Carl Showalter makes fun of her. There are also the shootings, callous and abrupt. Against this Chief Marge, seven months pregnant, applies cozy small-town buoyancy as a way of ferreting privileged info out of crooks.

Our introduction to Marge comes far into this atmospheric and genre-less film. The crime aspects are at this point engaged. We've met Jerry, the auto sales executive with a ridiculous scheme. We've met Carl and his laconic, merciless accomplice, both memorably played by Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare, who have settled for it. These are eccentric, off-kilter, incomparable characters, yet when things lose control and Marge and her husband Norm are presented is when the movie unearths its heart. Marge Gunderson is one of a sprinkling of characters whose names always abide in our recollections, like Travis Bickle, HAL 9000, Walter White. They are totally, daringly themselves in stories that rely upon exactly who they are. Lacking all the fetishistic glamour of other Hollywood policewomen, Marge is the chief in Brainerd, Minn., continues to have periods of morning sickness, inhales all the processed, frozen, prepackaged, canned food she can get her hands on, speaks in a Minnesota dialect where "yeah," pronounced "ya," is showered like a motto. She's a born cop, really sharp. Although one might find the lack of response by the State Police to the murder of one of their own highly questionable, at the crime scene local police chief Marge nevertheless promptly and efficiently deduces what occurred, and discerns there were two killers, one big, one small. Her partner, not so nimble, doesn't catch on that "DLR" signifies a dealer plate: "I'm not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your police work there, Lou." There is a scene some people seem to think baffling between Marge's first and second interviews with Jerry, when she has dinner with a high school classmate Mike Yanagita. It's a disquieting hiatus that, when it comes to motif---a forlorn guy lying hysterically, failing to mask his anxiety---weighs in as pivotal. Mike functions as an echo of Jerry, and the dinner scene works like the connector between Marge's first and second interviews with him. The next morning, she is about to revisit Brainerd when a high school girlfriend tells her that everything Mike said was a lie. That's the alarm bell that compels her back to Jerry, and is somehow superior to the recourse, a single interview with Jerry that just swelters him out.

William H. Macy's performance is a cave-in of dread and agitation. Here is a man who just wants one thing: a $750,000 loan from his affluent father-in-law, so he can purchase parking lots and make some of his own money. His office's vertical blinds are used visually like prison bars. If he can steal the money, he can buy the lots. Yes, his wife will have to be abducted, but he'll have to be big about that. He knows nothing about the kidnappers, and lawyers are hounding him all day for data that would reveal the missing car. And there's Marge, sitting across his desk, bright and sprightly, asking him questions he cannot answer. Macy wilts, his smirking grin a cringe, his restraint like a nerve clasp, and things cram him further in.

The snow and cold endow the Coens with cinematic reference marks and an inescapable feeling of location. The opening shot fades in to Jerry's desolate venture to transfer the car with a haunting folksy Carter Burwell score. High-angle shots reveal two frosted parking lots, which the Buscemi character curiously decides to boost license plates and make a ransom exchange. When Jerry struggles to satisfy a discontented client, the goofy man and his wife have their goose-down coats amusingly heaped in their laps. The frost and gloom oppress everything, and in the middle, in their snug envelope, are Chief Marge and Norm. The Coens have been said to gibe their characters, but their affinity for Marge generates the healing power of Fargo. Marge is the spark plug, alleviating grief and mending law and order. As a result, this might be the warmest film the brothers have so far made, and no less exceedingly ripe and uniquely engrossing than their other works.