_Fargo_ _Fargo_, you read before the credits begin, "is a true story.'' Like most true-story movies, it asserts that names have been changed ("at the request of survivors'') and any similiarities to real people or events are coincidental. The familiarity of this initial disclaimer is such that you tend not to pay much attention to it. (Do they even make movies of the week that aren't based on "true stories'' anymore?) Equally unsurprising are the film's basic plot elements - murder, betrayal, car dealerships, North Dakota snowdrifts - all pretty regular ripped-from-the-headlines stuff that doesn't ask you to suspend too much belief. But Joel and Ethan Coen's new movie isn't quite regular anything. The first image is a spread of dreary, swirling whiteness. As a car's headlights slowly emerge, moving toward the camera in long shot, this background becomes readable as a snowy highway, a desolate nowhere on the way to somewhere else. This transformation isn't so much startling as it is stark, and a little foreboding. The Coens, of course, are good at this kind of visual slippage; they're renowned for their clever manipulations of lenses and steadicams, as well as for their deconstructive smartassness. _Fargo_, like _Blood Simple_ and _Miller's Crossing_, is a genre film turned inside out, which means that it maintains an obvious affection for the conventions that it's twisting. In this case the genre is true crime. If Richard Brooks' _In Cold Blood_ (1967), based on Capote's novel, is a famous and well-respected example of the genre in movies, more often true crime is perceived - and trashed - as being perverse (voyeuristic, sensationalistic) in and of itself: that is, it doesn't need the Coens to make it look warped. Still, _Fargo_ illustrates some of the genre's difficulties, its multiple addresses and ambiguous moralizing, its squishy distinctions between fact and fiction. At its cagiest, it's exploring the paradox at the center of true crime and its difficult cousin, reality tv (_Cops_, _America's Funniest Home Videos_): the genre promises to reveal something real, to elucidate some motive or significance, but it can never deliver. True crime offers a counter-narrative to the after-the-fact, cliched observation that "He was such a nice young man'' (which suggests that you can't tell the difference between you and him). The pile-up of details in true crime allows the illusion that you can "tell'' what makes the villain tick, that you can define deviance in contrast to some arbitrary norm. But true crime is always really about the lack of such knowledge: criminal motivation remains opaque, evil remains incomprehensible, the order of the world still seems random. The reason for this effect is that comprehension would be too terrible to bear. If you could understand serial killers or mothers who kill their children, you'd be too close. So, for all its bluster about "shocking photos'' or "inside stories,'' true crime is really about erecting boundaries, establishing differences between you and them - you and the killers, you and the home video subjects. (Even if _Cops_ briefly aligns you with "the men and women of law enforcement,'' it also insists on some spectatorial distance, some resolute lack of identification that flies in the face of conventional narratives.) _Fargo_'s spin on all this suggests that reading true crime is a sophisticated business, one that demands continual renegotiation of where you are. Ostensibly, its presentation of events is pretty straight-on: the characters are mundane, ugly, fairly detailed, yet they remain at a distance, almost surreal, caught in a stereotypical "web of deceit.'' Car salesman Jerry Lundergaard (William H. Macy) is desperate for money, so he arranges to have his wife Jean (Kristin Rudrud) kidnapped, with the hope that her wealthy father Wade (Harve Presnell) pay off big time. The mercenary kidnappers are also desperate, but in ways more serious than Jerry can even begin to fathom. Carl (Steve Buscemi) and Gaear (Peter Stormare) are scary guys: witnesses can only describe the squirrelly and lethal Carl as "kinda funny-lookin','' but Gaear exudes a meanness that makes even his partner squirm. The film makes the exchanges between these characters comedic, familiar, and peculiar. Jerry can't quite articulate his frustrations, but you know what he means. "You see,'' he tells Carl and Gaear, fumbling to avoid their bad-guy glares, "These are personal matters.'' They smirk at his awkwardness, and you're in a tight spot because you know they're sinister, but you also know they're right about Jerry. He's a loser. Later, you see Jean, chirpy and airheaded in her Minneapolis home, fully enjoying some cornball Regis and Kathie Lee type show on television. But then the kidnappers crash through onto the scene, wearing black ski masks and carrying crowbars, and their brutality makes any joke at her expense look suddenly cruel. Her lame attempts to escape, whimpering and running across a snowy yard with a bag over her head, make Carl laugh out loud. By that point though, your own laughter at Jean is far from easy. The film gives you a protagonist of sorts in Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand), the small town police chief who tracks the kidnappers after they shoot a state trooper and a couple of passing motorists while on their way through her jurisdiction. (This would be Brainerd ND, birthplace of Paul Bunyon: a huge commemorative statue is shown whenever anyone enters or leaves town, emphasizing, in its own bizarre way, the disquieting overlap of reality and fiction.) Marge is seven months pregnant, which allows for some morning sickness jokes and gives her a decidedly nonthreatening appearance. She spends her off-duty hours being sympatheic to the pressures felt by her painter husband Norm (John Carroll Lynch) or watching nature shows on late-night tv (some bug "throwing off the larval envelope,'' a moment that's appropriately both grotesque and banal). When she's not hunkered down over a plate of fast food fries or all-you-can-eat buffet at the local wood-paneled restaurant, she's making accurate sense of the crime scenes, gauging exactly what happened and how (this body's here, so that means the shot came from there). She's clearly a remarkable detective, but she states her dead-on conclusions with lilting vocal rhythms and a sweet smile that make her seem innocuous. It sounds like a Columbo plot but it's not. Marge is atypical precisely because of her typicality. The film's focus on her day-to-day activities begins to seem almost distracting. While doing some investigating in Minneapolis, she meets up with a former schoolmate, Mike (Steve Park), an encounter that seems wholly extraneous at first. But it's such a strange bit of business that it stays with you, as you try to figure out what it has to do with Marge's dedicated, wily tracking of the criminals. Mike tells her a weird and tragic life story, but she's utterly unable to decipher it or his motives, which makes you start to doubt her abilities, and in turn you start to wonder about your own ability to decode what's going on. This is the film's genius, its emulation of true crime's obsession with prosaic or spectacular minutiae, coupled with a refusal to make such details cohere into master plans and meanings. Its violent scenes are quick, crude, and awful, with blood all over the place (as when one character is shot in the face, or another disposes of a body in a woodchipper), but they don't really take you where you think you're headed at any given point. As it reveals obsessiveness, disillusionment, and eventually, some kind of arbitrary and troubling justice, _Fargo_ closes the distance between you and them, so that you're left to wonder about your own interest in what you're watching.