SOURCE: A review of Fargo, in Film Quarterly, Fall, 1996, pp. 31-34

In the following review, McKinney praises some aspects of Fargo but asserts that the Coens condescend to the characters.

The Coen brothers have spent 12 years and six movies walking a tightrope of their own devising, flirting with the nihilism and ex-cathedra contempt for the poor materials of reality that are marks of the gifted undergraduate. What has saved them from hipsterism is a sense of irony that is not merely ironic, a consistent faith in the power of controlled craft to open up holes of chaos in content, and a study of the quirk so monastic and intent it yields ambiguities not retrievable by looser methods.

What also saves them is an artistic personality which, in opposition to many of their vaunted peers in the film school generation, is less a commercial trademark, a promise of the...