SOME MYSTERIES DON'T MAKE ANY SENSE AT ALL

Blog number 441 ******** 21 November, 2010

It is a truism in writing fiction that the writer never puts in anything that does not further the story. Especially one that has nothing whatsoever to do with the story - like the one in Fargo, the movie.

For those of you who have not seen Fargo, it concerns a pregnant North Dakota sheriff in a small town looking for the killers of a highway patrolman and two civilians. Damn good movie! Damn good story. Damn good acting, directing, writing and casting.

However - there is a scene where the sheriff meets an old friend from high school and has dinner with him. They talk, she later finds out he has lied about marrying an old high school friend who has died. He didn't and she didn't. And that's all there is to that. The story of Fargo seems to have been laid aside and this thing brought in for no reason whatsoever.

Is this scene something left over from a scene which at one time fit in the story, but when the rest of it was blue-lined, this part was forgotten? Was the male actor a great friend of someone and was given this little scene out of friendship? We never see him again. In fact, I have never seen him in any other production anywhere. What's the story here? I don't know and I sincerely doubt that anyone is going to tell me.

One of my most persistent fantasies and wishes is that I worked as a columnist for a newspaper - famous and trusted enough that I could get important people to talk to me, and then I could find out the answers to a lot of things like this that really bother me. But that ain't gonna happen.

Maybe next time.

What brought all this on was that I just finished reading "A Very Private Gentleman." The ending was a shootout between the protagonist and a man that had been stalking him. The protagonist kills the stalker. Spoiler alert.

Turns out that the stalker commissioned a woman to find a person that could make a gun to his specifications and the woman hired the protagonist. The stalker did not know who was making the gun, the woman did not know who the assassin was going to kill, and the protagonist did not know who was going to be using the gun, nor for what. The fact that the stalker was using the very gun the protagonist made was pretty ironic. This irony was completely lost in the movie. The stalker was getting revenge for the suicide of his mother which he blamed on the protagonist. This all made sense.

In the movie, "The American," created from that book and starring George Clooney, the ending was that the woman who commissioned Clooney's character to make a special gun to be used in an assassination was the intended assassin. In other words, she commissioned the protagonist to make a gun that she would then use to kill him. That's not ironic, that's stupid.

The woman was killed by a secretly placed exploding bullet while shooting at Clooney's character. This didn't make sense. How did he know she was going to use the gun on him? Did he ordinarily put exploding bullets in his guns? I don't think so. Why did she pick that particular bullet out of two cases of about forty bullets? Who knows? Why did she want to kill him? Who knows?

In the movie, there is no stalker. The woman just shows up, wants Clooney's character to make a special gun, they go on picnics, have a little fun, pfft. The whole movie didn't make any sense. Anywhere.

Why was the movie changed from a very good story into a mush of nonsense? The story in the book could have easily translated into a story movie. Was the screenplay done by a commission of writers so that nobody's theme could dominate? Who knows?