Fargo Series 4 - It's a little more complicated

I've been box-setting “Fargo” recently, admittedly some time after it was released to the world on Channel 4.

Now we are in 1950, in gangsterland Kansas City, where one stream of gangsters takes over from another on an almost continuous conveyor-belt of violence. 

It is a gangster saga, with some earlier incarnations of people who show up in other Fargo Series. I liked the touch of it being out of sequence, so you have to join the dots in both directions.

 

Everyone wants to be an American, but the mixture of Jewish, Irish, Black and Italian mobsters illustrate that the American Dream had to be hard won. There's scenes of extreme prejudice and Kansas – a city – still manages to look somehow small time.

But its organised crime which is being manipulated darkly from Sardinia and New York. A Mafia and a Black syndicate head toward out-and-out warfare, despite the opposing bosses sitting together in one another's offices or on park benches trying to cut deals.

 

However, it is a complex weave, with threads snaking out of an episode and then reappearing much later. One for the note-takers in places.

 

The casting is excellent, with plenty of stock characters propelling the story along. There's several set pieces which are redolent of other Coen Brothers movies and the monochrome episode features a dog, a twister tornado and a pair of boots sticking out from what could be under a building. I don't think we were in Kansas anymore for this segment, although most of the forward propulsion of the narrative stopped to allow this episode to be dropped into the sequence.

 

It can all be interpreted as allegorical, although there's some concentration needed to find some of the points. 

 

I couldn't decide, by the end, if the right people had their comeuppance and I was rooting for one person to make a surprise return. Alas no, though. Although the one who did return managed to finalise something in the way of a Coen movie.