• Fargo marked a welcome return to the stark landscapes and endless highways that characterized Blood Simple and Raising Arizona, with the arid scrub of the southwest replaced by flat, polar vistas. (The movie was filmed during the second-warmest Minnesota winter then on record, requiring some outdoor shoots to be moved north for adequate snow cover.) Though Hudsucker had been the Coens’ “biggest” movie by far, it was also their most enclosed. Despite its much smaller budget of around $7 million, Fargo in many ways feels like a larger film, one that eschewed the soundstage for a wider world.

• The city of Fargo itself appears only in the opening sequence of the movie, in which Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) enlists the services of two seamy hoods (Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare) to kidnap his wife. (Even there, Fargo appears in name only: The Kings of Clubs bar was actually located in Minneapolis.) With customary diffidence, the Coens maintain that they named the film after the city merely because they liked the sound of it. But it’s easy to imagine the title as a tongue-in-cheek play on Chinatown, as if the North Dakotan metropolis were the locus of some festering moral contagion that will gradually envelop the film. It’s notable that the Coens tell us almost nothing about what has taken place before the movie begins. We don’t know anything about the relationship between the Buscemi and Stormare characters—except that it seems to have begun recently—nor of the latter’s precise connection to Shep Proudfoot. There’s no backstory regarding Jerry’s marriage either. Most important of all, it is never revealed how in the world Jerry has fallen hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt.

• As with Miller’s Crossing, composer Carter Burwell based the score on a traditional song connected with the cultural heritage of the characters in the film, in this case a Norwegian folksong called “The Lost Sheep.” (You can hear a rendition here.) The result is a moody, magnificent score, with the slightest hint of whimsy in the accompanying sleigh bells. I rank it second out of all of Burwell’s scores for the Coens, narrowly beating out the manic whistling and yodeling of Raising Arizona. The central motif, played gently at first on a harp and then far more disconcertingly on a scratchy, Scandinavian hardanger fiddle, is the perfect accompaniment for the opening of the film: the snow-white screen, on which we gradually make out a bird in flight, and then the approaching car, framed by vertical telephone poles (another inverse nod to The Third Man)? The bird, incidentally, was a lucky, unscripted accident—just like the plunging pelican that was the final image of Barton Fink. The Coens, as they’ve noted on several occasions, just have good luck with birds.

• The film belongs to the first genuinely heroic figure in the Coenverse, McDormand’s Chief Marge Gunderson—so much so, in fact, that I’m always surprised when she doesn’t make her first appearance until a third of the way into the film. But the balance maintained between her, Macy, and Buscemi is exquisite. Macy’s eye-opening performance instantly vaulted him from theater and television into the top tier of cinematic character actors. And it’s fascinating the way that Buscemi—in his first starring performance for the Coens after three consecutive bit parts—so often operates as our interlocutor in the film: the “sane” one despite his criminality, untouched by the weirdness of “Minnesota Nice,” who merely wants everything to go as planned, and who bit by bit comes violently unglued as it doesn’t.