Fargo Season 3 (spoilers)

Let’s face it, the motivation of most of the people who create “entertainment” is just to pick up a paycheck.  Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it is the main reason why I show up for work every day.  Of course, there are some people whose motivation is to actually entertain people.  It is an unusual artist like Noah Hawley whose desire is to both entertain and raise philosophical posers, such as is it true that the future is determined but the past is uncertain?

Fargo just wrapped up its third and possibly final season.  Noah Hawley has other things on his plate, like the entertaining but maddeningly obtuse Legion, and frankly if he wants to call it a day after three suburb seasons of television more power to him.  In an industry where everyone wants their show to go on forever, it is nice to see someone decide not to churn out another season of pap just because someone will pay them handsomely to do it.

When I heard there was going to be a TV series based on Fargo, but without the Coen Brothers’ active involvement, I thought it was the silliest idea I’d ever heard.  How could anyone, especially someone not named Coen, recreate the special intersection of greed, fate, and, well, general pinheadery that made Fargo one of the most special films of the past few decades?  But season one demonstrated that Noah Hawley couple not only capture the Coens’ unique world view, but also create memorable, quixotic characters and get rich performances out of a cast of actors both familiar and brand new.  Season 2 was almost as good, and with season 3 there was another small diminution in the result.  It is still one of the best shows on TV, but as I said about Twin Peaks, you can only be non-linear for so long until non-linear becomes linear.

I guess my main criticism of season 3 is that the main bad guy, VM Varga (David Thewlis) is a far cry from the spectacular Lorne Malvo (Billy Bob Thorton) in season one or Mike Milligan (Bokeem Woodbine) in season 2.  Varga is despicable, but the character is overwritten and frankly not credible.  It’s a fine line, and Thewlis is a good enough actor to sell it, but in the end, no one who speaks as floridly as Varga would last five minutes in the evil business.

Season 3 did see the acting you expect to find in Fargo, most notably Ewen McGregor’s brilliant turn as non-identical brothers Ray and Emmit Stussey.  Playing identical brothers is difficult, but playing brothers so physically distinct must have been even harder.  Then there is the problem of playing opposite yourself in many scenes, where you have to play one side of the conversation and then take off your make-up, put on the other character’s make-up, and do it over from the other side. 

McGergor was ably assisted by Carrie Coon in the wise Minnesota female police officer role, Mary Elizabeth Winstead as a morally dubious woman who did have a code, and Michael Stuhlbarg as Emmit Stussey’s partner.  All did fabulous work, week in and week out.

I did not care for the police chief Moe Dimmick, played by Shea Whigham.  Hawley has had bad bosses before, but they had some redeeming quality.  Bob Odekirk’s character in season 2 seemed like a sexist jerk, but then he sponsored an African student studying in America.  Dimmick is just a dimwit; as Roger Ebert said about a similar character in the movie Die Hard, he exists only to be wrong.  But he’s a minor character and it’s a minor quibble.

Let’s get back to the philosophical point being made by Hawley.  Season 3 began with a surreal exchange in soviet Russia, where an innocent man is being interrogated by a soviet official.  It is obviously a case of mistaken identity, but the official points out that the state can’t make a mistake, so the man must be guilty.  This scene is bookended with the final scene, where Varga tells police office (now Homeland Security agent) Gloria Burgle that what happened in Minnesota in 2010-11 is up for interpretation, but his future is certain, and it does not include him eating mashed potatoes at Riker’s Island.  Someone other than him was convicted of the murders that occurred; therefore, he must be innocent.  Official imprimatur becomes reality.  We know he’s wrong, but the events of the show make a good case.

It’s all great, but there is a sense that we are reaching diminishing returns here.  As much as I’ve enjoyed three seasons of Fargo the Series, I’d rather Hawley stop a year too early than a year too late.  Fargo is too great of a motion picture to have its reputation sullied by something as mundane as mediocre television.

What happened to Tom Cruise's career?

What an age we live in!  I remember when a movie gross of $100 million for a film’s entire run was something very few producers could even dream of, and now a film can gross $32 on its opening weekend and be called a flop.

Such is the fate of The Mummy, Universal’s inauspicious beginning to what it is calling its “Dark Universe” series if films.  The movie was envisioned as a blockbuster tentpole feature, but it scored a pathetic 17% at Rotten Tomatoes and its commercials made it look like a generic action film, and an uninspired one at that.

The Mummy continues the late career woes of Tom Cruise, whose career prior to 2007 was a master class in managing a movie career.  It is incredibly difficult for actors to make good choices in picking film roles, as evidenced by those stories of George Raft turning down the lead in The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca and ending up playing a parody of himself in Some Like it Hot.  Cruise has bobbed and weaved, mostly paying action heroes but unafraid to play bad guys (Collateral), unsympathetic characters (Magnolia, for which he got an Oscar nomination and should have won), small roles (his hilarious extended cameo in Tropic Thunder) and even a Nazi (Valkyrie). 

But Cruise seems to have lost his mojo, as Austin Powers would say.  Since 2007, not counting the increasingly tired entries in the Mission Impossible series, he has had a string of . . . not flops, but not successes.  Other than MI:4 and MI:5 the only film he starred in with a Rotten Tomatoes rating of over 65% was Edge of Tomorrow (original title Live Die Repeat), a commercial flop that has an inexplicable Rotten Tomato rating of 91%.  The critical response to his other films has ranged from tepid (Valkyrie at 62%, Oblivion at 53%) to disastrous (37% for Jack Reacher 2, 41% for Rock of Ages).  His only film to cross the $100 million threshold according to RT (again, excepting the Mission Impossible films) is Tropic Thunder, in which he had an extended cameo under a ton of latex make-up, and starred Ben Stiller and got an Oscar nomination for Robert Downey Jr. 

Other lowlights include the first Jack Reacher film, which I was shocked to see had a 62% rating (I thought it sucked), and 52% for Knight and Day, which I thought was wildly underappreciated.  For anyone else this would be a good run, but for a star of Cruise’s magnitude it is underwhelming.

Let me circle back a second to talk about Jack Reacher, a project that demonstrates Cruise’s hubris.  The title character is described in the course material as a mountain of muscle, befitting the casting of Vin Diesel or Dwayne Johnson.  Tom Cruise is in impressive shape for a guy in his late 50’s, but his diminutive stature made it an epic miscast that Cruise thought he could overcome by sheer star power.  There is a line where the police ask a motel clerk if there is anyone staying at the motel who could kill a woman with one punch, and the clerk names Jack Reacher, adding “Just look at him.”  Again, Cruise is impressively buff, but he doesn’t look like he has a killer right hook.  If you cast an actor like Cruise in the role, you have to change that line, unless Cruise’s ego made it stay.

Cruise’s last big non-series hit film was 2005’s War of the Worlds, the Stephen Spielberg directed film that managed to be inferior to the 1953 version made with vastly inferior technology.  Early in his career (1983-89) he had a string of films in the 90% range, like Risky Business (96%), Rain Man (90%), and Born on the Fourth of July (90%). Okay, during that period he also made Legend (48%), Top Gun (56%, but a huge commercial hit), and Cocktail (an astonishing score of 5%), but as long as he hit the occasional home run you could dismiss the misses as an actor taking chances.

I still maintain this—Tom Cruise will win an Oscar one day.  He co-starred when Dustin Hoffman won for Rain Man, and he helped Paul Newman win for The Color of Money.  He has made a lot of people in Hollywood a lot of money, and he is a superb actor.  At some point he will make a critically acclaimed film and, unless he gets trumped by someone doing a celebrity impersonation (as happened to Michael Keaton getting edged out by Eddie Redmayne) he will take home an Academy Award.

What his choices over the past ten years tell me is that he is still willing to take risks, but he is no longer able to hit the occasional home run.  His films do okay at the domestic box office, but they still do great business overseas so he’ll keep getting work.  My suggestion would be to maybe stay away from the sci-fi scripts, as the audience for those films are too young to remember that Tom Cruise is a film icon.

Cruise, despite his movie star good looks, is an extremely talented actor; his work in Magnolia is one of the best performances I’ve ever seen.  He has the same capacity as Cary Grant, who made light comedy appear so effortless you never appreciated how much work he put into it.  The question isn’t about his talent as an actor; it is about his ability to choose suitable film roles.