Although movies had been set in Minnesota before Fargo (notwithstanding its misleading North Dakota title), movies as disparate as The Farmer’s Daughter, The Heartbreak Kid, Purple Rain, Grumpy Old Men, it was the Coen brothers who converted that territory into grist for the mill. (On the laugh meter, Wisconsin and Iowa don’t even register.) This one, set specifically in the small town of New Ulm, and directed by the Danish-born Jonas Elmer in his Hollywood debut, is nothing if not laboriously ground out, a campaign of cynical populism that simultaneously satirizes and sentimentalizes the natives, in a milky image that might or might not be meant to suggest the lens-fogging frost of a Northern Star winter, snowed under by the standard quota of pop songs decreed for romantic comedies. Renée Zellweger, as the fish-out-of-water hatchet woman dispatched from Miami headquarters to downsize the local food plant but (in due time) digging in to fight for its survival, gauges her charm at about half wattage, which proves to be about twice as charming as full wattage. (Cf. Leatherheads, another pinch of Minnesota grist for the mill.) Her reactions to snow, ice, and subzero wind are nicely mimed, and the scene of her untamably erect nipples at her welcoming dinner party is one for the books. Harry Connick, Jr., the uninteresting love interest, has been written as a Carolina transplant to protect him from ridicule and preserve him for romance. Meantime, Siobhan Fallon Hogan, as a friend of Jesus with a secret tapioca recipe, does the heavy lifting on the Scandihoovian accent; and the character’s surname of Gunderson, shared with the heroine of Fargo, seems an open tribute to the Coens. With J.K. Simmons, Frances Conroy. (2009) — Duncan Shepherd
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