Guy Lodge 

DVDs and downloads: Fargo, Of Horses and Men, Rob the Mob and more

Billy Bob Thornton is on top form in the television adaptation of the Coen brothers’ Fargo, writes Guy Lodge
  
  

Billy Bob Thornton stars as Lorne Malvo in the Emmy award-winning series Fargo
Billy Bob Thornton stars as Lorne Malvo in the Emmy award-winning series Fargo. Photograph: MGM Photograph: MGM

American television is on such a roll these days that even its worst-sounding ideas are turning to gold. Fine, maybe not the worst ones: I’ve seen a whole quarter-hour of Real Husbands of Hollywood, after all. But the point stands that adapting one of the Coen brothers’ most singular and celebrated comedies for the small screen seemed foolhardy on paper. Yet the Emmy-winning 10-parter Fargo (Fox, 15) is very much its own delight: not a remake, not exactly a spinoff, but a return visit to the 1996 film’s skew-whiff Minnesota underworld that shares the Coens’ taste for dark-blood deadpan without quite copying it.

It’s also the best showcase in many a year for the gruff peculiarity of Billy Bob Thornton, here on brilliantly insidious form as Lorne Malvo, a drifting contract killer who comes to the debatable rescue of an insurance-sales nebbish, wonderfully played by Martin Freeman at his most baleful and beleaguered. That’s the central narrative thread, but there’s grimly homespun crime and punishment to spare in this deep-pile tapestry, which arguably tackles loftier moral terrain than the film that inspired it, which, incidentally, is available on Netflix if you fancy a side-by-side midwestern wallow.

Precious few of this week’s film DVD releases, meanwhile, can be recommended without reservation. The best one by far, however, is a genuine one-off, at once dryly comic and dramatically rapturous. Icelandic first-time director Benedikt Erlingsson’s Of Horses and Men (Axiom, 15) is a multi-stranded fable studying the complex kinship between the two eponymous breeds of beast, and the prismatic whole all but defies short-form description. It’s safe to say that it features at least a couple of stunning images you haven’t seen before, most vivid among them a furious episode of stallion-mare coitus, with a human rider still in the saddle. For context, and plenty of other transfixing horseplay besides, it’s probably best to see for yourself.

It’s nearly four years since Bolivian curdled-family drama Southern District (Axiom, 15) surfaced fleetingly at the London film festival; belatedly arriving on DVD this week, it’s elliptical slow cinema that merits investigation by patient adventurers. Domestic crisis bleeds beneath the surface of moneyed decor and everyday activity in a plush La Paz household, but director Juan Carlos Valdivia uses a still, penetrating camera to weed it out eventually.

There’s more going on, however, than there is in Before the Winter Chill (Metrodome, 15), a numbingly disappointing exercise in marbled French ennui from director Philippe Claudel, who previously excelled with Kristin Scott Thomas in I’ve Loved You So Long. His redoubtable leading lady returns, this time opposite Daniel Auteuil; both soldier stoically through proceedings as a well-heeled couple at a marital crossroads, hungry for love and communication and anything resembling dramatic stakes.

Even the dullness of Claudel’s film is more comforting than the dead-eyed corsetry of In Secret (Sony, 15), a sudsy, tone-deaf adaptation of Emile Zola’s 19th-century Parisian romance Thérèse Raquin that somehow turns stars as vital as Oscar Isaac and Elizabeth Olsen to balsa-wood cutouts; only Jessica Lange got me through, with her reliable hauteur and scarcely masked contempt for the entire enterprise.

There’s better news on the VOD front, as Raymond De Felitta’s sprightly true-crime caper Rob the Mob, which was perfectly worthy of cinema exposure, nonetheless skips the big screen and heads straight toward a streaming outlet near you. (A DVD release, meanwhile, is scheduled for January.) De Felitta previously made the underrated New Jersey family comedy City Island, and his latest is similarly, winningly modest – Bonnie and Clyde played as tragedy-laced Bronx farce.

Michael Pitt is cast interestingly against type as swaggering dimwit Tommy Uva, who briefly hit big with the novel moneymaking scheme of raiding mafia social clubs, but it’s the incandescent Nina Arianda, as his brash, dubiously compliant girlfriend, Rosemarie, who romps off with the film. A star is born, if anyone cares to notice.

 

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