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Chris Rock (center) as gang leader Loy Cannon
Photo:
MGM / FX / Joyn
It certainly exists somewhere, the place where the history of the USA with all its violence is condensed.
But Fargo?
This city of 124,662 in North Dakota?
To recognize in it a
pars pro toto
for the whole country, probably nobody has thought of that yet.
The characters and their fates, which the Coen brothers first introduced in their film »Fargo« in 1996, and then author and showrunner Noah Hawley since 2014 in his anthology series of the same name, are too bizarre.
If there is something abstract that "Fargo" represents, it is: misanthropy, especially in an unpleasant Protestant variant.
Whether contract killer or petty bourgeois who dreamed of a little more money, power or sex: In the end, an unworthy death always awaited them, either in the freezer or directly in the chopper.
Only those who contented themselves with hot chocolate and conjugal intercourse as the greatest earthly promises got off scot-free.
In season 4, which is available on the streaming platform Joyn instead of the usual Netflix, almost everything is different now.
The deaths that die are as bizarre as usual (among other things, a tornado is allowed to do its work).
But the historical aperture has never been torn open: The series is now trying to capture nothing less than American history itself.
The result is so strange as "Fargo" has never been.
Slaughter follows slaughter
This story, as the rapidly condensed opening scene makes clear, is for Noah Hawley a series of tribalist slaughter.
First it is a Jewish cartel that controls the business of Kansas City, the main venue for this season, in 1920.
Then the Irish come to power through treason.
The Italians, in turn, contested their place in the city until they were challenged by an Afro-American gang in 1949.
At this point the action of the season begins.
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Jason Schwartzman (right) as Josto Fadda with Salvatore Esposito as his brother Gaetano
Photo: MGM / FX / Joyn
The leader of the Italians, Josto Fadda, is played by Jason Schwartzman, the nephew of Francis Ford Coppola and thus part of an Italian (cinema) clan, thanks to a neatly winking cast idea.
Even more inspired is the choice of Chris Rock to head the black gang, Loy Cannon.
Rock, very rarely seen outside of comedy, has already described the role as the best he has played so far.
Cannon's duel with Fadda for supremacy in Kansas City is the defining moment of this season.
It is carried out with a lot of lead, but also very verbose, because every fight in this trench warfare, which extends over eleven episodes, is also a fight for, as Joe Biden would say, the soul of America, and as such each of these fights is accompanied by a detailed monologue explained.
Damaged by society
In contrast to the territories, the audience sympathies should be quickly distributed.
Jason Schwartzman is allowed to exude his cute joke as usual, but Chris Rock has Gravitas on his side.
With wide-open eyes and a quiff wavy swinging into the sky, he expresses astonishment and distance to the world in which he moves.
Although he rules just as ruthlessly as his competitors, in the most critical moments he can only react instead of act.
So his character can evade some serious moral dilemmas, which is no coincidence, because Cannon represents the first non-white main character in the »Fargo« cosmos and is constructed as such clearly differently.
Where other characters compromise each other personally - for example through greed or lust - Cannon is damaged by society.
This becomes abundantly clear when he presents the idea for the first credit card to various bank executives and is rejected time and time again.
Months later, he drives past a billboard on which one of the banks he has visited advertises the invention of the credit card.
Even if the gangster Cannon wanted to take the right path, it becomes clear to him and the audience that it would be blocked for him by the racist majority society.
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Jessie Buckley as the Psychopathic Nurse Oraetta Mayflower
In the year in which "Black lives matter!" Became a worldwide outcry, this moral clarity, which is unusual for "Fargo" conditions, appears fundamentally appropriate.
But Hawley turns the contrasts into nuanced glare.
He has the absolutely evil embodied in the whitest figure in this season ensemble.
Shooting star Jessie Buckley ("I'm Thinking of Ending Things"), red hair, pale skin, somehow of Nordic descent, plays the psychopathic nurse Oraetta, who likes to transport her patients into the afterlife with a few drops of poison.
Her last name: Mayflower, like the ship that once brought white settlers to North America.
The limits of reinvention
Like so many characters and their great actors, including Ben Wishaw and Timothy Oliphant, Oraetta Mayflower has no meaning in the story.
It is simply grotesque staffage.
At the same time, she embodies something very typical from the films of the Coen brothers, which also remain an important point of reference this season: namely the tendency to give physical expression to character defects and perversions.
Buckley always distorts her mouth with make-up into a crooked grin, in addition to tripping in annoying mouse steps.
Her male counterpart in the caricature-like exaggeration is Salvatore Esposito: As the most brutal of the Mafiosi by far, he is also by far the thickest of them.
Almost painfully, these two characters show the limits of the reinvention of "Fargo" as
all American epic
, because with the serious dignity of Cannon they simply do not go together.
Perhaps this season will come full circle, because it will be the first whose story does not work as a series, but would be best condensed to film length.
»Fargo« as a film: That would be something new.
"Fargo"
seasons 1 to 4 are available on Joyn
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