By Chris Revelle | TV | January 9, 2024 |
By Chris Revelle | TV | January 9, 2024 |
Fargo is a fascinating creation that exists at an unlikely crossroads between adaptation of the Coen brothers film that gives it its name, homage to the Coens’ body of work in general, and the telling of a new original story. Over time, the series has shifted to other towns, states, and time periods, but kept the fabulous tension of hearing the “Minnesota nice” accent while watching violent crimes unfold. This fifth season (airing on FX and streaming on Hulu) brings us to Minnesota once again (with a lot of North Dakota, too!) for a supposedly true story taking place in 2019 in which sweet-voiced and angel-faced Dot Lyon (Juno Temple) is avoiding detection and capture from her ex-husband Sheriff Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm). Tillman hires unsettling murderous weirdo Ole Munch to break into Dot’s home and capture her, except when Munch shows up with a little help, Dot is more than ready for them, fighting her way out with traps, misdirection, and the kind of improvisation that leads to using a lighter and an aerosol can to torch a kidnapper in the face. “You did not tell me that she was, for real, a tiger,” Munch says to Roy.
Fargo has used this term to describe and explain Dot often this season: she’s ferocious, she’s hard to pin down, dangerous when cornered. Roy describes how, like a tiger, Dot will allow her pursuers to believe they hunt her, but it’s really her that’s hunting them. We see evidence of this in spades. Every time Dot is captured or trapped, she always seems to wriggle out with a combination of wits, guile, and quick thinking. God help the fools that invade her home because Dot studied the Kevin McAllister Home Alone trap-setting textbook and advanced the field. It’s tremendous fun to watch Dot fight off her attackers that it doesn’t matter how many times we do it; Dot is trapped or captured or chased quite often, and yet it’s always immensely entertaining watching her work.
It helps that her foes are loathsome chuds of Roy’s, spitting tobacco and typical MAGA invective, and that their knuckle-dragging king Roy is so thoroughly despicable. It makes sense when you learn the extent of Roy’s violent, dehumanizing abuses that Dot had to become a tiger to escape. There was no way out from under Roy and his goons unless Dot became the tiger and put her whole self into escaping Roy’s ranch. Without a hunter to pursue the tiger, Dot was able to settle down, marry sweetest boi Wayne, and have their daughter Scotty. With Roy re-entering the picture, the tiger had to come back. This is the primary conflict of the season: how Dot must re-assume the tiger mantle once more to defeat Roy and secure a safe and happy existence for her family. As Dot, Temple composes her elfin features into a wide-eyed and naive expression that holds fast like a lid over roiling emotions that break the surface of her mask only when they become overwhelming. Her voice is high, soft, and lilting most of the time, but if pushed, it can deepen and become much more serious. Temple plays this act as the identity Dot needed to craft to survive and injects each look with just a rim of desperation around the eyes.
Though the show reminds us often that Dot is the tiger of this tale, it also introduces us to two other tigers: Lorraine Lyon (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and Indira Olmstead (Richa Moorjani). Lorraine is Dot’s mother-in-law who’s introduced having a family photo taken for that year’s holiday card. In it, the family stands together toting automatic rifles, a display of strength, according to Lorraine. As the CEO of the largest debt collector in the USA, Lorraine appears at first to be another antagonist and she definitely acts that part at first. Lorraine is very suspicious of Dot and treats her like mud on her shoe. She thinks Dot is lying when she says she wasn’t kidnapped and seems to believe overall that Dot is bad news. As Lorraine sends agents out to look for Dot when she goes missing in the wake of her house being burnt down, we get to know another side of the otherwise seemingly scummy CEO.
As much as she speaks disparagingly to them, Lorraine loves her family and wants to protect them. She also isn’t the slightest bit pleased by Roy or anything he represents, and watching Lorraine verbally gut Roy is great fun. As awful a person as she is, Lorraine goes to extreme lengths to rescue Dot simply because her son Wayne loves Dot. She even sends her pet lawyer Danish out to wreck an election to put Roy on his back foot and get Dot back. Indira also showed Lorraine Dot’s past of abuse and how she fought her way out, which let Lorraine understand Dot as a fellow tiger. Other tigers need help some of the time. Lorraine’s accent, a lovechild between Foghorn Leghorn and Katharine Hepburn, would have toppled a lesser actor, but of course, Leigh absolutely slays it. When she lets an occasional twang out of her mouth, Leigh is showing us how Lorraine had to make a new self too: instead of the presumably humble Minnesotan she might’ve been, Lorraine is armored in mid-Atlantic snobbery and will burn you alive for underestimating her.
While Dot and Lorraine are practiced tigers with fangs and claws sharpened from use, Indira is a novice earning her stripes. Indira is a paladin-esque character with a strong sense of right and wrong but struggles to stand up for herself. Indira is under a towering pile of debt accrued by her lazy, misogynistic husband Lars who spends their her money on new expensive hobbies that he swears this time will take off. Indira works hard as a local police officer only to find her wages are spent as soon as she’s made them, if not sooner. Any attempts to push back or get Lars to change his spendthrift ways are brushed aside by Lars’ complaints that he wants a wife who will wait on him hand and foot and do all the emotional labor of their relationship. When she points to the many figures of debt weighing them down, Lars accuses her of inflicting negativity. Until Lorraine exhorts her to stop apologizing so much, it doesn’t seem as if Indira has realized just how cowed she’d become. Debt collection queen Lorraine offers Indira a job as head of security in the Lyon empire and the offer seems to suggest a new value to Indira, as if she didn’t consider herself worthy enough. When she catches Lars in bed with his ex, Indira, perhaps with Lorraine’s offer ringing in her head, finally takes a big step into tigerhood. Indira dumps Lars, tells him to move out, and goes off to find Lorraine. Moorjani’s face as she hears dickbags like Lars say hurtful nonsense is the portrait of a battle: you see her trying to weather the storm, maybe mentally murmuring “water off a duck’s back” in every flare of the nostril, pursing of the lips, or flutter of the eye. Indira is here to make the world a little more correct and she’s learning how much of her tiger self she’ll have to discover to do it.
Season 5 of Fargo is the usual Coen-flavored crime chaos, but its focus on women driven to various extremes by men is a welcome twist. Like a thunderstorm, you can watch the tiger with awe, but we don’t see the horrible events that made them. Seeing these women tap into their tiger selves is exhilarating but reminds the viewer of the terrible reasons that brought these women to this point. Dot, Indira, and Lorraine are tigers, and it’s worth wondering whether they should have to be.