The year is 2019. The place is inevitably Minnesota. A mother and her nine-year-old daughter flee, Tasered, from an unexpectedly violent school meeting because, yes, Donald Trump has already happened and the attack on the Capitol is in the works, so the United States has begun living in the past, or too try to revive it and it broke in half. And that means that even school boards can become powder kegs in an instant. It is, as always in “Fargo”, the television series based on the Coen brothers' classic, which Noah Hawley meaningfully rephrases, a seemingly everyday event that sets in motion a tragedy that is catastrophically absurd and unstoppable and, in the end, becomes unimaginable will result.
And it's no coincidence that this time the daily event that puts Dorothy Lyon (a Juno temple beyond Ted Lasso, that is, beyond, as if she was born for the role of the elusive Dot) on the map – and it allows it to unleash the typical spiral of violence – is a collective, daily event. Because the setting of this fifth season – which can be seen in a new episode every Wednesday on Movistar + -, once again impeccably written and directed by Noah Hawley, is the cannibalistic America after Donald Trump. That is, this America in which the perpetrator and the enemy are the other, and the other is not someone who comes from far away, but the guy from the house next door: your neighbor. The one who doesn't think like you and believes the world should run its course.
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Yes, this season Hawley is attacking a certain type of white trash: those who allow themselves to, or think they can. Because someone owes him the spot he lost. And he plans to get it back. Enter Roy Tillman (a real Jon Hamm, light years away from the iconic Donald Draper), a western sheriff, a guy who lives as if the Wild West still existed. He bathes in barrels, rides a horse, fights between marriages, as is customary in a time ideologically close to the Middle Ages, and believes in the law in his small fiefdom in Fargo. A guy, a rancher and a preacher, a brash guy who wraps his own face in towels – and his figure on a horse – in front of the real police officers while he spits smoke from a ridiculous cigar in their faces.
Juno Temple, as Dorothy Lyon in the fifth season of “Fargo”.Movistar+
They also attack Hawley and his narrative prodigy – a noir that sublimates and reinvents every last element of noir – that fear of the neighbor that Trump brought with him. Something that perfectly embodies this season's heroine. Someone who, by the way, passes as a different kind of white trash without being one, and who plays the double game of condemnation or prejudice based on stereotypes. Dot Lyon is a supposedly goofy housewife who is actually, as the police officer whose life she saves at a gas station says, “that trickster: McGyver,” or as the villain of the story says, this time Ole Munch (a Sam Spruell, who speaks about himself in the third person as if he were a cursed baby), “a tigress.” Someone who represents the invincible power of everyday life or authentic freedom.
In her return to writing, Jennifer Jason Leigh shines – as Dot's multi-millionaire and extremely violent mother-in-law: look at the Christmas card with the family pointing shotguns at the camera – as do all the characters in all parts of a series. which, as was the case in the Coen classic, is made up of its enviably perfect – and human in their macabre weaknesses – protagonists. They unfold the plot, and if it is unpredictable, it is because there is nothing more unpredictable than a man cornered. And Fargo does that like no other. To corner a person. And not just anyone: someone whose life seemed easy but wasn't. It actually never is.
What is particularly noteworthy is the absurdity that the violence triggers every time. And the way the violence escalates. Here is the epicenter of what Fargo reflects – the film and each season of the series -: how in a society where everyone can decide whether to pull the trigger or not, violence inevitably escalates for even the most ridiculous reasons. And it has no end. As a reflection of what is hopelessly weighing on a country that believes itself to be free and that can never be free as long as it is as afraid as it is – of being dependent on weapons – Fargo hits the nail on the head again and more once. , adapting its macabre fable morality to the randomly violent pulse of the moment.
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