I had high hopes of Channel 4's reworking of the Coen brothers' magisterial Fargo. Hopes and fears too, because I loved the original so much I was afraid they might wreck the remake. And in a way they have.
Sure, it's well acted, the snowy exteriors look great, Molly, the new Marge Gunderson, is just as wonderful a character as Frances McDormand's original. And yet.
Here's the thing. The makers of the new Fargo have fallen into the trap so carefully avoided by the Coens. It turn on the character of Lorne Malvo, played with concentrated malevolence by Billy Bob Thornton (we may well find that the writers have chosen this name in fact because it is so nearly an anagram of malevolent). What so distinguished the bad guys in the original was that they seemed like real people. As a former criminal lawyer I can testify that very few criminals are bad in an interesting way. I never met a single one like Lorne Malvo (just in case we hadn't worked out how bad Malvo is, the writers gave him a charming little speech about bestiality in the last episode).
The ones I met were stupid, panicky and damaged rather than clever and imperturbable. And this was true in the Coen's version too. I remember the Steve Buscemi character for his bad teeth and whining voice; the guy with the bad blond dye job was altogether nastier, but he was also thoroughly dim. Together they did bad things, but the Coens realised that essentially these were individuals with low-wattage IQs, and in my experience that's true to life.
Curiously this was something the Coens got wrong in No Country For Old Men, and I mused then about why it was that novelists and film directors felt obliged to present bad people as edgier versions of themselves - people perhaps who liked wearing black polo neck sweaters, had interesting hair cuts and once had a tattered copy of The Glass Bead Game in their greatcoat pocket. Next time you watch Thornton as Malvo see if like me you can picture him as an ageing hipster, tramping the streets of Hoxton in search of an internet start-up. In films it's generally not enough to present criminals pitiable losers - directors have to make us feel, as with No Country For Old Men, that in some way the perpetrators are evil personified, Lucifer on his day off, the devil incarnate. They're wrong and it makes for bad art. Bad people are boring and - pace Hannah Arendt - banal.
PS A small bet that the new Fargo won't replicate the old one's famously downbeat ending. In the original we see the blond man feeding Steve Buscemi's leg into the woodchipper as Marge approaches through the snow, revolver in hand. Surely, we think, vulnerable Marge, gun or no, can't possibly succeed in arresting this awful man. But next shot there is Marge driving back to town in her squad car with woodchip man in cuffs in the back. Slowly the audience exhales and unknots its stomach. It is the end. I think the new Fargo will funk this. Molly will arrest Lorne. But it'll be a conventional cliff-hanger without the Coens' downbeat surprise.
