“Oh my. Where? Yeah? Aw geez. Okay, there in a jif. Real good, then.”

Fargo opens with a shot of an empty highway so shrouded by a hazy snowfall that you can barely see the single car driving down it clearly until it’s almost right in your face. A mournful score plays on the soundtrack as the car passes. The car drives down flat, empty, snow-covered roads towing another car until it parks outside of a dive bar in Fargo, ND at night.

The film mostly takes place in flat, unexceptional countryside in the dead of winter. This cold, dull setting perfectly encapsulates the dissatisfaction that so many of Fargo‘s characters feel, and the landscape’s relative desolation gives many of them a false hope that they can get away with anything.

The cold Midwestern setting also informs the characters’ infamous dialects — not just their accents, but their manner of speech. Most characters are “Midwestern nice” — they avoid talking about negative emotions and find any possible way to make their interactions with other people pleasant, even when they’re anxious or trying to be intimidating. Bluntly conveying what they’re feeling is considered to be taboo. The only characters who fully speak their mind end up offending others so much that they get shot in a parking lot at night, or are disposed of in a wood-chipper.

This disparity between what characters want and what they say lends the film much of its comedy — and leads to many of its miscommunications, which drive the plot forward through its comedy of errors.

This manner of speech reflects the characters’ values as well as their shortcomings. Most of the characters appear to have what they need, at least superficially… but below the surface, many of them are suppressing what they really desire.

William H. Macy’s character, Jerry Lundegaard, resides in a nice house, has a stable job as a car salesman, and lives a comfortable suburban existence. His life isn’t exciting, but he’s hardly struggling. He’s just dissatisfied. He wants more. His wealthy father-in-law refuses to loan him money to start his own business venture. Jerry misleads customers to try to wring a few hundred extra dollars out of each deal… but it’s not enough. So, he decides to have his wife kidnapped so that his father-in-law will pay that money to him in a roundabout way through a ransom.

It’s a dramatic, convoluted decision for a character who earnestly, unironically says things like “darn tootin'” and “the heck you mean?” to make.

Jerry’s life is full of minor conflict, which he generally avoids as much as possible. His son is a C student; we find this out during an amusing exchange during which Jerry’s wife is visibly anxious about dishing out a punishment and making her son feel bad. Jerry just ignores it.

In another scene, he rips off a customer, and the angry customer stutters and blurts profanity out at Jerry — and then immediately recoils at his own impropriety. Jerry moves on with the conversation as if that never happened.

The dramatic irony of these types of exchanges — “Midwestern nice” masking neuroticism — is why Fargo is so funny.

Even when Marge Gunderson is interrogating criminal suspects, she’s polite: “Now, I saw some rough stuff on your priors, but nothing in the nature of a homicide. I know you don’t want to be an accessory to something like that,” she says, seriously. Then, a genuine smile breaks out on her face as she happily follows that up with, “So, you think you might remember who those folks were who called ya?”

For characters who are uncomfortable swearing, many of the people in Fargo find themselves in an abundance of unsavory situations. They often deal with it in baffling ways, and their decisions lead them down dark paths.

At the dive bar in Fargo, North Dakota, Jerry Lundegaard meets with two hit men, Carl and Gaear — the latter sits silent and stoic, the former is tense and neurotic from the start. Their dialogue sets up a comedy of errors that continues to escalate as the story unfolds. Jerry thought that they were meeting at 8:30; they were told 7:30 — the table is covered in empty beer bottles; Gaear has “peed three times already.” They were expecting the ransom money and the car; Jerry only brought the car. “You want your own wife kidnapped?” Carl asks incredulously. Jerry’s explanation as to why he wants to do this is scattered, and Carl starts to have second thoughts… but he decides to do the job anyway. Why not. What could he have to lose? (It turns out to be a lot.)

It becomes clear that the hit men don’t get along. Carl’s brash attitude annoys Gaear immensely; this dynamic becomes more abrasive over time, beginning with a dispute over pancakes and ending with bloody violence. Their conflict adds to the film’s comedy — as does their utter ineptitude. They break into the Lundegaard home by smashing a window right next to their victim in broad daylight. Gaear is cut by the glass and takes a break during the home invasion to raid the medicine cabinet. He pulls his ski mask off in full view of first-floor windows. Jerry’s wife’s panicked missteps are the only reason why they succeed in their abduction.

This break-in might be the most overtly ridiculous scene in the movie, and it’s played for comedy — but it also is emblematic of the characterizations of the hit men, Jerry, and all of their accomplices: they are self-absorbed, entitled, and reckless. Carl somehow emerges as the most redeemable of the bunch — at least he exhibits refreshing honesty and some level of self-awareness.

Before that break-in scene, Jerry makes a last-ditch effort to get his father-in-law to loan him $750,000 in cash. When Jerry refuses to only take a “finder’s fee” on the proposed deal instead of the whole sum of money, his father-in-law plays hardball: “Well, look, I don’t want to cut you out of the loop, but this here’s a good deal. I assume, if you’re not interested, you won’t mind if we move on it independently.” Jerry leaves in a huff. He sees no alternative besides letting his absurd kidnapping plot move forward.

His inability to accept what he has causes a spiral that unravels his life.

As he exits his father-in-law’s office, we watch him walk toward his car in an otherwise vacant, snow-covered parking lot. He’s small in the frame. Tire tracks in the snow form an intersection. The shot is symbolic of his self-imposed isolation, and the crossroads that he finds himself at in this moment. After this scene, his decisions lead him to a point of no return.

Marge serves as a foil for Jerry. She inhabits this same world and is also “Midwestern nice,” but her values — her appreciation for what she has, and how she protects it — emphasizes Jerry’s fatal flaw and the immorality of many of those around him.

She isn’t introduced until a third of the way through the movie. By that point, we’ve spent more than a half hour with Jerry, Carl, and Gaear. Marge and her husband Norm, by contrast, are a breath of fresh air.

We first meet her in the early hours of the morning after a roadside massacre takes place outside of Brainerd, MN; she gets a call to investigate the crime scene. Before she can get out of bed, Norm groggily wakes up and says, “I’ll fix ya some eggs.” She tells him to go back to bed, but he insists. She smiles. “Aw, Norm.”

The crime scene is brutal, but she doesn’t rush out of the door to look at it. The bodies will still be there when she gets there. She wakes up with her husband, eats a good meal, tells him that she loves him, and then leaves for work — well, after the prowler gets a jump, at least.

She’s seven months pregnant, but she keeps working because she’s good at her job, and she likes it. She sees things that her investigative partner doesn’t see at the crime scene… even as she powers through personal discomfort: “I think I’m gonna barf.” “Geez, you okay, Margie?” “I’m fine – it’s just morning sickness.” Pause. “Well, that passed.”

She does difficult work, but she doesn’t let her job consume her. She takes breaks in the middle of the day to eat lunch with Norm. She is happy when he brings Arby’s to the precinct for her. They watch boring nature documentaries before they fall asleep together at night. It’s not exciting, but that’s okay. She’s consistently grateful for what she has.

Like others, she occasionally wonders whether she’s missing out on something more invigorating in life. That’s one of the reasons why she puts on makeup and a nice blouse and picks a fancy restaurant in the Twin Cities (“The Radisson? Oh yeah? Is it reasonable?”) for lunch with an old high school acquaintance without telling her husband about it. But that conversation devolves quickly, and it reinforces her notion that the grass is decidedly not greener on any other side. She chooses to make her own happiness with her life as it is.

That scene also changes the way in which she pursues her investigation and interrogates Jerry Lundegaard.

Marge shows great bravery during her climactic confrontation outside of the lake house in the blood-soaked snow. After the shoot-out, her conversation with Gaear in reinforces her worldview, which starkly opposes that of Jerry and his hit men. All of this chaos, “and for what? For a little bit of money. There’s more to life than a little money, you know.” She looks out into the distance. “And here ya are,” in her custody, “and it’s a beautiful day. I just don’t understand it.”

She goes back home to Norm after bearing witness to the worst crimes she’s likely seen in her years as a small-town police officer. She holds her husband a little tighter.

Norm breaks the silence: “They announced it.” As long as we’ve been following them, we’ve known that Norm’s beloved hobby is wildlife painting, and he recently entered a competition to have one of his paintings be printed on a local stamp.

“Three-cent stamp,” he says, a little disappointed. “Norm, that’s terrific!” she exclaims. He tries to downplay his accomplishment — “Hautman’s blue-winged teal got the twenty-nine cent. People don’t much use the three-cent.” Marge won’t let him be so self-deprecating: “Oh, for Pete’s sake – of course they do! Every time they raise the darned postage, people need the little stamps! When they’re stuck with a bunch’a the old ones!”

“I’m so proud’a you, Norm,” she says. “We’re doin’ pretty good.”

They smile, and hold each other, and are grateful.

These two parallel stories — Jerry & his hit men, Marge & Norm — intertwine throughout the latter two-thirds of Fargo. Things don’t turn out so well for those in the former. But for Marge and Norm, well — they’re doin’ pretty good.

By integrating these two stories in this way, the Coen Brothers reinforce Fargo‘s core theme:

Maybe it’s best if we just appreciate what we have.

And, if so much of our chaos is of our own making, then it stands to reason that our peace can be, too.