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    ‘Fargo’ Season 5, Episode 5 Recap: Tiger Moms

    Dot proves once again that she can’t be caged. She and Lorraine may have more in common than they think.Season 5, Episode 5: ‘The Tiger’Although her accent as Lorraine Lyon suggests Amy Archer, the fast-talking journalist who likes to tout her bona fides (“I’ll bet my Pulitzer on it!”) in Joel and Ethan Coens’s “The Hudsucker Proxy,” Jennifer Jason Leigh is projecting power as a kind of entitled boredom. She doesn’t merely walk into a room. She makes an entrance, like royalty. And when her commands are not heeded, she either calmly asks for the heads of those who defy her or she goes for the throat herself. She doesn’t raise her voice. She is steady, calculating and vaguely put out.There are two tigers, Lorraine and Dot, in this week’s drum-tight episode, even though a voice-over narrator, who speaks of tigers in a nature-doc parody throughout the show, seems to be referring only to Dot. And while that narration says nothing about a sisterhood between tigers, this episode engineers an unexpected alignment between the two, who have been at odds, to put it mildly. The opening sequence, which shows Lorraine deep in thought in her office, is a helpful little recap of where their relationship stands: She seems to recognize that Dot is formidable, a “wolf in sheep’s clothing,” and genuinely committed to her son.But perhaps she is more ally than adversary.Two connected scenes appear to redirect Lorraine’s perspective on the situation. The first takes place at a lunch meeting between two bank executives who had been negotiating with her lawyer, Danish Graves, on a deal to sell to her company. (The numbers being “pretty sweet” nods to the sale Jerry Lundegaard tries to arrange in “Fargo” the movie.) Lorraine wants to expand her Redemption Services from the debt business to the credit business, because “everyone loves a lender, not so much the repo man.” But she quickly realizes that her counterparts across the table have no interest in dealing with a woman, so she leaves them with new numbers that are not sweet at all.Later, she gets a visit from Roy Tillman, who she suspects has come to shake her down for money to let the Dot situation go. When Roy surprises her with a demand to get Dot back as his biblical property, Lorraine’s mood shifts exactly as it did with the bank executives. His claim to have felt relief when Dot resurfaced gets a skeptical “uh huh” from Lorraine that’s a fine example of how well Leigh plays the tiger, with a laconic half-interest that masks a deadly ferocity.“Listen, slick,” she tells Roy, “nothing would make me happier than to put that woman in a box marked ‘return to sender,’” but she bristles at his retrograde demands. She and Dot may be at odds, but they’re aligned in fighting men who wish to own them.Based on what we know about Lorraine, she wouldn’t necessarily be unfriendly to a guy like Roy, a “constitutional sheriff” who stumps for limited government and probably has his own holiday pictures of the family posing with assault rifles. You would almost mistake her for a progressive in the way she sizes him up as a libertarian who abhors taxes and the social safety net, even though she operates a predatory business that surely benefits from weakened oversight. By the same token, she wouldn’t necessarily be unkind to the shady bankers in the earlier scene if they had negotiated with her in good faith. She just won’t be disrespected. Or underestimated.None of this is to say that Lorraine feels a sudden warmth toward her daughter-in-law. But at this point, Dot needs all the help she can get. She spends most of this gripping hour on the run after Lorraine and Danish claim power of attorney over her and have her committed to a psychiatric ward. By sticking Dot in a different wing at the same hospital where Wayne is recovering from “a serious electrical event,” the show engineers a tense set piece in which Dot pauses mid-escape to protect her husband from being kidnapped. It’s a sign of Roy’s respect for her cunning that he has abandoned a third attempt to capture her and decides to go after her family instead.This leads to yet another unlikely allegiance between women, as Dot turns to Olmstead for help protecting Scotty, who stands to be another target for Roy’s henchmen. Dot gambles wisely that Olmstead’s feelings on this case haven’t yet settled, despite her being the deputy who initially picked her up for tasing one of her colleagues. These are two women who have known imperfect marriages, after all, as Olmstead is reminded in the steady thumping of shanked golf shots that must pulse in her head like a migraine. As the Marge Gunderson of this season, Olmstead has sound instincts and a sympathetic nature that makes her persuadable.Lingering over all these developments is a big question that “Fargo” seems content in putting off for as long as possible: Who is Dot, anyway? Or, more to the point, who is Lorraine? How did this reedy housewife from suburban Minnesota acquire a certain set of skills like Liam Neeson in the “Taken” movies? For now, it’s helpful for Dot to have powerful women like Lorraine and Olmstead in her corner. But tigers are inscrutable, too.3 Cent StampsCutting to the wounded orderlies after Dot promises to maim them is a funny touch, but even better is when Juno Temple lets out a Minnesotan “shoot” once she has been strapped to the gurney.A fine mic drop moment from Lorraine, who likens Roy’s desire for “freedom with no responsibility” to his wanting to be a baby, though again, she would probably pull the lever for him at the ballot box.Wayne’s bathroom talk (“I just went. Poop came out.”) suggests the path to neurological health remains long for him.Lorraine implores Olmstead to look for Dot with the line, “Are you going to look for her, or are you going to sit drinking coffee in the one house in the state where I know that girl ain’t at?” Coen-heads will recognize that line from the great Trey Wilson in “Raising Arizona.”Dot drives away in a car with DLR plates. Another “Fargo” classic. More

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    ‘Fargo’ Season 5, Episode 4 Recap: Trick or Treat

    Halloween provides the perfect disguise for a home invasion. Of course, this is “Fargo,” so nothing goes quite as planned.Season 5, Episode 4: ‘Insolubilia’One of the strengths of “Fargo” this season is the way it has drawn closer to the Coensverse by re-contextualizing major pieces of it, rather than by tucking in referential Easter eggs for fans to collect. (Although it has done plenty of that, too.) The first attempt to abduct Dot, for example, closely mirrors the sequence in the Coens’ “Fargo” where Jean Lundegaard has her morning routine disrupted by intruders, though Dot proves far more capable of defending herself. She is determined, beyond all reason, to be like Jean, the housewife and P.T.A. mom who carves out a little time to knit in front of weekday talk shows. But she cannot escape who she really is.Roy Tillman has no interest in escaping from his past. He is building it out into a corrupt, theocratic fief across North Dakota and the open expanses of the Upper Midwest. He is a third-generation lawman, just like Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) in “No Country for Old Men,” but he doesn’t share Bell’s fears about facing a world of overwhelming evil because voters have put him in a position to perpetuate it. Whatever justice might be achieved in this season of “Fargo,” it is going to happen despite him and the tremendous political and tactical arsenal he has at his disposal.Late in this week’s episode, Roy is framed exactly like Bell at the end of “No Country,” as a retired Bell sits at home in front of a windowsill with his wife, recalling bleak, dead-haunted dreams about his father. Only here, the windowsill is in another couple’s mobile home and Roy expresses no misgivings about the violence he is about to unleash. We had seen him in an earlier episode counseling this same couple about an incident of domestic violence that Roy chose to manage in typically extralegal fashion, with a threat to the husband about his behavior and, let’s say, some antiquated advice on how his wife might fulfill her duties.As he smugly holds court on a Biblical passage relevant to this situation, Roy anticipates everything that is about to happen, just as he anticipated the likelihood of the husband’s getting physical with his wife again. He knows that he can goad this “beta man” into trying to shoot him, and he knows that he’ll be the quicker draw. He also knows that he can count on the wife to support his cover story: that the man he just shot is Munch, who had come home bragging about killing a state trooper and wounding another one. On Roy’s turf, the best way to cover up his connection to dead bodies is with other dead bodies.Roy’s extralegal tendencies have drawn the attention of Meyer and Joaquin, the two F.B.I. agents itching to impose law to the lawless lawman. But their appetite for justice isn’t shared by their overseer, who tells them, “Maybe he loses the election and the whole thing goes away.” The political allusion to Donald Trump here is unmistakable: Should the law be applied to Roy as if he were any other citizen, or do the voters get to decide whether his alleged sins are forgivable? In Roy’s case, as in Trump’s, there’s the considerable threat of “what happens next” that separates him from an ordinary candidate for prosecution. The agents are reminded that Roy is “the most powerful sheriff in North Dakota” and he is connected to “the most powerful militia in the Upper Midwest.” A lost election might guarantee a quieter withdrawal from public life.Yet the voters may not have a voice in this matter, after all. This week, we learn that Dot, formerly Nadine, was Roy’s second wife. And despite her valiant attempts to deny her identity and everything that has happened to her, Dot has been identified as the woman on the surveillance camera who outwitted Munch and his partner and saved Witt Farr, the wounded state trooper. In the aftermath of a home invasion that left her husband electrocuted and their home burned to cinders, Dot tries to brush off the whole thing as a case of bad wiring and refuses to acknowledge Witt, who wants to thank her for saving his life.The obvious question for Witt and Olmstead is why Dot would deny such acts of valor ever happened. Surely the Roy connection will give them some clues.Another big question to consider: What is supposed to happen if Dot/Nadine is brought back to Roy? He does not want her killed but returned, and she has proved to be an exceptionally wily captive. Perhaps that speaks to a key parallel between Dot and Roy, which is that they will deny reality if they have the opportunity to manipulate it to their own ends. Roy believes himself mandated by God and the voters to manage his domain as he sees fit, like tagging one gunshot victim as Munch and burying another before he can be verified as the victim of a “car accident.” Dot still refuses to loosen her grip on a domestic utopia that is now literally turned to ash. Perhaps the two are made for each other, after all.3 Cent StampsThe Gator-led assault on the Lyons’ den is thrillingly staged, from the half-silly/half-menacing “The Nightmare Before Christmas” masks to the small twists on expectations. Although Dot is able to fend off her attackers, some of her home security innovations backfire, like the lightbulb rigged to work as an alarm and the exposed wiring that ends up electrocuting her husband.Roy and Dot are both rooted in spiritual conviction, which the episode puts in pointed contrast. At the chapel on his ranch, Roy refers to the crucified Jesus as “old friend” while recalling an incident in which he watched Beelzebub himself whisper into the ear of a killer. In another scene, Dot assures a shaken Scotty that “the wicked stick to the darkness while we get to stay in the light.”Shrewd juxtaposition between Olmstead’s call from a predatory “debt-relief specialist” and Lorraine’s spin job to a Forbes reporter on Redemption Services, the business that netted her $1.6 billion in profit the previous year. Perhaps the funniest moment of the episode is the way Jennifer Jason Leigh quietly nods, “of course,” when a lackey whispers in ear that her son’s house has been burned down.“With all due respect, we’ve got our own reality.” — Danish Graves, giving voice to the episode’s thesis.Munch asks for “pancakes,” affirming him as a much smarter (and chattier) version of Gaear Grimsrud in the movie. More

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    ‘Fargo’ Season 5, Episode 3 Recap: Preparing for a Blood Bath

    Dot’s pursuers seem to be on the verge of being pursued themselves.Season 5, Episode 3: ‘The Paradox of Intermediate Transactions’The Coen brothers filmography is speckled with a specific type of abstract character, a dark and indomitable force of nature who isn’t quite human and operates on a code that is known only to him. Think Leonard Smalls (Randall “Tex” Cobb) in “Raising Arizona,” a mercenary biker who seems manifested from a nightmare, or Charlie Meadows (John Goodman) in “Barton Fink,” a gregarious insurance man who presents himself as “the common man” but reveals a second identity that is exceptionally uncommon. Then there’s the gun-for-hire Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) in “No Country for Old Men,” who asks his victims to “flip a coin,” but always seems in control of their fate regardless. He may represent Death itself, but his agenda has an odd rigor and consistency to it.We have seen these types in Noah Hawley’s TV “Fargo,” too, like David Thewlis as a mirthless, ruthless British business V.M. Varga in the third season or Billy Bob Thornton as the hit man Lorne Malvo in the first season, a satanic figure who believes people are primal beasts and acts accordingly. And now for this new season, Hawley has offered Sam Spruell as Ole Munch, who seemed at first like a highly seasoned contract killer — nothing like the rank amateurs played by Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare in the movie — but who takes a leap to the mythic in the third episode. His clients are now his targets and it is safe to say they don’t know much about him.Neither do we, frankly, even after the episode makes an unexpected leap to early 16th-century Wales, when Munch or a Munch-like ancestor takes part in a sin-eating ritual. He’s asked, “In forgiveness of your debts to man, will you consume his lordship’s sins to god?” And so he does, a poor man collecting coins for absorbing a rich man’s wrongdoings so he can ascend to heaven.That is the spiritual burden his earthly humility has forced him to take on, perhaps. In 2019 Munch has accepted coins to do a dirty job for Roy Tillman, who was neither clear about the difficulties of the work nor honorable about paying the money he owed. That has turned Munch into a 21st-century debt collector, owed much more than money.Though Hawley owes the Coens a debt of his own for his open-ended lease on their audacity, he keeps moving the season forward with a confidence that often tilts into swagger. When Munch lays in bed listening to a police radio, the show samples a music cue from “The Shining,” if to suggest that he is an eternal presence like Jack Torrance at the Overlook Hotel, where Jack was told he had “always been the caretaker.” That’s terrible news for Munch’s mother, who looks uncomfortable with the prospect of her creepy son occupying the rocking chair upstairs indefinitely. And it is even worse news for Roy and his half-wit son, Gator, who underpaid, undermined and underestimated Munch and now have to anticipate his revenge.But first, Gator has to prove to his father that he is not a loser, which isn’t easy for a kid with a Confederate flag posted over his bed. All this business with Dot comes as the Hillmans appear to stocking munitions for an insurrection-to-be-detailed-later, but Dot has prepared herself for a second abduction attempt.Last week she enlisted Scotty’s help to improvise a security system like Macaulay Culkin in “Home Alone.” This week she switches up the street signs to confuse the Hillmans and brings her husband on a trip to Gun World, where she racks up $5,000 worth of weapons before learning about a federally mandated waiting period. Her cheerful Midwestern pivot to the clerk (“Let’s take a look at that pepper spray then”) echoes the opening scene of the movie, when Buscemi gets impatient with Jerry and asks to “take a look at that Cierra” he stole off the lot.Dot’s insistence on digging into this domestic life that she has built with Wayne and Scotty puts her in a fascinating spot, because those are the only two people who accept her absurd denials. She has been unmasked as a fraud to the police and to her mother-in-law, and she has the Hillmans and various contract goons who are not only after her, but know exactly where she lives. We do not know what her former life was like as “Nadine,” Roy Tillman’s wife, but their relationship now feels a lot like Uma Thurman and David Carradine’s in the “Kill Bill” movies, in that epic revenge is all that stands between the heroine and the peaceful, normal life she thinks she deserves.Getting there will be a blood bath, it would appear. The episode ends on the sort of cliffhanger that leaves you wishing for back-to-back hours like the premiere. Gator and his crack team of masked yahoos have found Dot, despite their confusion over the mixed-up street signs, and Munch has reverted to a scary, primal state to stalk his prey. One sequence seems set up for folly, the other for a disturbing spasm of violence. That’s a balanced “Fargo” diet.Lamorne Morris in “Fargo.”Michelle Faye/FX3-Cent StampsUsing the phrase “Antecedently on …” for “Previously on …” sequence continues to be an eye roller. This show can get too cute for its own good.Roy’s preoccupation with Dot keeps him from getting aroused by a truck full of sexual role-playing costumes, like “helpless hitchhiker” or “angry feminist.” (It says something about Roy’s view of women that those specific types turn him on.)Another small callback to the movie: Dot tells Wayne that Scotty “signed off on” the change in costume to zombie hunters. This is what Jerry tells his father-in-law’s lawyer about the parking lot deal.The return of Witt Farr, the North Dakota state trooper injured in a shootout at the convenience store, suggests a possible lifeline for Dot. Witt catches Gator pocketing evidence from a case file and isn’t intimidated by the young man’s threats.The overt politics of the season come out in a spicy monologue from Lorraine, who’s annoyed that the police are still asking questions about Dot. In her estimation, their job is to “separate those who have money, class and intellect from those who don’t.” They’re not supposed to interrogate people like her. More

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    ‘Fargo’ Season 5, Episode 2 Recap: Sowing Disharmony

    Jon Hamm arrives as a lawman who isn’t very concerned with the law.Season 5, Episode 2: ‘Trials and Tribulations’In its persistent engagement with the Coenverse so far, “Fargo” has done best when it tweaks our expectations rather than simply reward fans with references to different movies. The premiere’s restaging of the Jean Lundegaard kidnapping from the movie “Fargo,” for example, was a dynamic way to establish Dot as someone who is surprisingly capable of dealing with a violent disruption to her morning routine.In this episode, Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm) gets an introduction that initially posits him as an upstanding rural lawman in the mold of Tommy Lee Jones in the Coens’ “No Country for Old Men.” It quickly becomes apparent, however, that he is a more unsavory man of justice.The opening monologue nods to Jones’s character, a third-generation sheriff who finds himself overwhelmed by contemporary evils. But Tillman is the type to perpetrate those evils himself under the guise of godly righteousness.His monologue is not delivered to us, in fact, but to a married couple in which the husband has violently assaulted his wife. Tillman is not enforcing the law but rather a patriarchal order that the man has disrupted by hitting his wife for the wrong reasons. In Tillman’s view, a man “only raises his hand when she forgets her place” — rather than book the husband, he has him choked as a “lesson.” The wife is then advised to, among other things, cater to her husband’s carnal needs “in order to sow harmony.”Tillman’s status as an elected official is underlined heavily for political effect here. He is a conservative North Dakotan, to put it mildly — “Jesus was a man, not some bearded lady” — and the laws of God, as he interprets them, supersede those passed by legislators.When two F.B.I. agents disrupt his hot-tub time to ask why he is not enforcing any laws, Tillman remains defiant and unabashed. But at this point, we know that Dot is his runaway wife and that Ole Munch (Sam Spruell), her one surviving abductor, had been working for him in an extremely unofficial capacity. Tillman has enough arrogance to shoo the agents away, but Ole Munch and Dot herself are still in the wind, which makes him a target, too.In another clever reversal of Coen expectations, Lorraine Lyon strongly suspects that Dot was in cahoots with the kidnappers in a ransom scheme but wound up getting cold feet. In the movie, it was Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) who was working with his wife’s kidnappers to pry money away from his father-in-law.But Dot has no interest in Lorraine’s money. Unless Noah Hawley has another card to play, we can believe that Dot wants nothing more than to continue her life with Wayne and Scotty, and that she probably feels like her mother-in-law’s wealth and status is more hindrance than advantage. Wayne’s job as a salesman at a Kia dealership seems like enough to keep their suburban life afloat, as it presumably has for the decade they’ve been married.One obvious problem with maintaining the status quo, however, is that Dot’s story is ridiculous on its face. She has Wayne in her corner, because he is supportive and deferential to his wife in a way that would repulse Tillman. But Deputy Olmstead isn’t buying her story about the two types of blood, neither of them Dot’s, found in her home, and Lorraine is even more suspicious of her motives.Still, despite her wish to return to her role as suburban wife and mother, Dot prepares for the next siege like Dustin Hoffman in “Straw Dogs” or Nick Nolte in “Cape Fear.” In lieu of a modern security system, she enlists Scotty’s help in stripping electrical wire, shattering light bulbs into bits of glass and pounding nails into a makeshift wooden club.“Why is there is sledgehammer in the vestibule?” Wayne asks later. A reasonable question, and a funny one, too. The show’s back-to-basics approach to the fifth season, with its return to the modern-day Upper Midwest milieu of the movie, also includes a greater emphasis on comedy. That doesn’t mean it is wholly successful, as when Hawley leans too heavily on colorful words — “commode” and “hoosegow” in the last episode, “vestibule” and “boudoir” in this one. But the lighter tone and brisker pace is giving “Fargo” an energy boost so far this season. The pace has been nice and snappy.There is also much to anticipate. Multiple parties are coming at Dot from different directions now, with Tillman (and everyone else) knowing exactly where she is and Lorraine poking around Dot’s personal history, which had seemed conspicuously blank upon initial vetting. In addition to having a freshly mangled ear, Ole Munch still hasn’t received full payment from Tillman for a job that wasn’t as easy as he was led to believe.Add to that Olmstead, the F.B.I. agents and a wounded highway patrolman who is curious about the skinny woman who saved his life, and the next peaceful pancake breakfast seems like a ways off.Minnesota nice: Juno Temple, left, and Jennifer Jason Leigh in “Fargo.”Michelle Faye/FX3-Cent StampsOle Munch’s line about being “a nihilist” gives us our first “The Big Lebowski” hat-tip of the season, referencing the German hoodlums who try to pull off a ransom scheme. Which then calls to mind one of John Goodman’s best lines from the film: “I mean, say what you want about the tenets of national socialism, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.”There’s an interesting echo between Tillman and Lorraine about what Dot “owes” them through her marital vows: “She made promises to me, my son, to have and to hold, for richer and for poorer,” Lorraine says. “And that’s a debt we’re going to collect.”There was some overwriting in Tillman’s rebuking of the F.B.I. agents while he sat in his hot tub naked: “Does my discussing matters of state in moist repose bother you?”Why in the world does a conservative county sheriff in North Dakota have nipple rings?A terrific shot across the bow from Dot in Lorraine’s direction: “No Ivy League royal wannabe is going to run me off just because she doesn’t like the way I smell. If you want to tussle with me, you better sleep with both eyes open. Because nobody takes what’s mine and lives.” More

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    ‘Fargo’ Season 5, Episode 1 Recap: Back to the Basics

    After drifting steadily away from its source of inspiration over the years, “Fargo” appears to be creeping back.Season 5, Episode 1: ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’After drifting steadily away from its source of inspiration — Joel and Ethan Coen’s 1996 neo-noir thriller about the bloody unraveling of a criminal scheme in Minnesota and North Dakota — “Fargo” appears to be creeping back.Over its past few seasons, the series has been mostly a regional crime show with period trappings, seasoned with references to “Fargo” and a host of other Coen brothers movies. (Last season, set in the gangland Kansas City of the early 1950s, tipped its fedora most frequently at “Miller’s Crossing.”) Now we open in Minnesota in 2019, a setting contemporary enough that the politically-connected pose for Christmas photos with assault rifles.The new episode begins, inauspiciously, by citing the end of “Fargo,” when Marge Gunderson, the pregnant small-town sheriff played by Frances McDormand, philosophizes with the dead-eyed pancake enthusiast (Peter Stormare) in back of her squad car. Only here, the cop is Deputy Indira Olmstead (Richa Moorjani) of the Scandia police department and the perp is Dorothy Lyon (Juno Temple), more commonly known as Dot, who has been picked up for tasing a police officer during a melee at the middle-school board meeting. Dot claims it was a case of “wrong place, wrong time” for her victim — and she appears to be right about that — but Olmstead is unmoved. “What’s the world coming to?” she wonders, before adding a quote lifted directly from Gunderson: “It’s a beautiful day.”Moments like these are when the TV “Fargo” is at its worst, glibly referencing a scene that takes moral stock of all the pointless tragedy that had unfolded for, as Gunderson put it, “a little bit of money.” In the movie, Gunderson’s lament follows a bloody and stupefying sequence of events spinning out from a ransom plot. But here, Olmstead is shaking her head over a P.T.A. dust-up that climaxed with an accidental tasing, which gives it no resonance beyond adding another Coens homage to an episode that is absolutely loaded with them.The series’s creator, Noah Hawley, who wrote and directed this first hour, has been oddly undiscerning about his quotations throughout the show’s run. But “Fargo” is most effective when it pivots unexpectedly off the Coens rather than merely tipping its hat.In the season premiere, Hawley pulls off a sequence that lifts directly from the daytime abduction in the movie, which leans into the serio-comic folly of a housewife scrambling to evade two subprofessional kidnappers. Many details are the same, but Dot is far more capable than was poor Jean Lundegaard, whose desperate terror was mostly played for laughs. Beyond their Midwest domestic habit of knitting while watching talk shows, Dot and Jean have little in common.We got a sense of Dot’s capabilities in an earlier scene at the police station, when she frets about her fingerprints pinging some national database. She seemed content to let her mother-in-law, Lorraine Lyon (Jennifer Jason Leigh, using her haughty accent from the Coens’ “The Hudsucker Proxy”), clean up the cop-tasing incident, but the kidnapping later makes clear that Dot is capable of handling things on her own.So as her colorful past finally catches up to her in the form of her abductors, she’s ready to fight back with a lighter, a can of hair spray and an ice skate. Later, she improvises an escape from them during a showdown at a gas station convenience store.More intriguing than Dot’s ability to wriggle out of such a dangerous scenario is her determination to pretend that it never happened. During the time she was under capture, her ineffectual husband, Wayne (David Rysdahl), had contacted the police and enlisted his deep-pocketed mother, who assumes she will be on the hook for ransom money. (“I don’t know why they think I’d break the bank for some low-rent skirt my son knocked up,” Lorraine says bitterly.)Yet when Dot returns home in the wee hours and immediately sets to whisking the Bisquick for her daughter Scotty’s breakfast, she acts as if nothing is amiss. She’d gone away to clear her head, she tells Wayne, and she doesn’t even suggest an explanation for the two different blood types, neither hers, the police found on the floor.Dot’s behavior connects back to the definition of “Minnesota nice” offered in the beginning of the episode, in which “a person is chipper and self-effacing, no matter how bad things get.” What’s missing from that definition is the fact that “Minnesota nice” also can refer to the passive-aggressive hostility that is often nestled beneath the surface sweetness, though perhaps that is a side of Dot we will discover later.For now, she’s a question mark to everyone who knows her, despite her desperate desire to return to the Jean Lundegaard-style role she had fashioned for herself. But she can’t play the chipper Minnesotan for long.Sam Spruell in “Fargo.”Michelle Faye/FX3-Cent StampsAmong the many Coen references: Dot’s booking at the police station is scored with “Gloryland” by the bluegrass musician Ralph Stanley, whose rendition of “O Death” is featured in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”References to the Coens’ “Fargo,” specifically, are even more strikingly abundant: Leigh’s accent may recall her performance in “The Hudsucker Proxy,” but she is filling in the role of Jerry Lundegaard’s rich, tightfisted father-in-law. “Scotty” is the name of Jerry and Jean Lundegaard’s only son, but here she’s a girl. While Olmstead seems to be the series’s equivalent to Marge, her husband is into playing golf rather than designing postage stamps; he also seems far more self-absorbed than the solicitous Norm Gunderson. The goon dabbing his severed ear with a paper towel recalls the injured kidnapper played by Steve Buscemi and, in perhaps the funniest nod, the tourniquet Dot uses on the wounded cop (Lamorne Morris) is secured by an ice scraper, which is a source of great frustration for Jerry.How much you like this episode may relate to how funny you find the word “commode,” because it is used as a punchline three times. Another colloquialism to watch: “hoosegow.”Wayne joking about voting twice for the attorney general is another hint that this season of “Fargo” may be engaging with contemporary politics in a way previous installments have not. More

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    ‘Fargo’ Goes Back to the Basics in Its New Season

    The new season of FX’s Coenverse crime drama goes back to the basics. Here is a look at the various chapters that came before it.The Emmy-winning FX limited series “Fargo” returns Tuesday with a new season, its fifth, that stars Juno Temple and Jon Hamm and goes back to the basics: Minnesota cops, North Dakota bad guys and plenty of snow-covered landscapes.Created by Noah Hawley in 2014, “Fargo” is named after the Oscar-winning ’90s film by Joel and Ethan Coen and often repeats that film’s character archetypes: kind but determined police officers that echo Frances McDormand’s Marge Gunderson; greedy, conniving husbands like William H. Macy’s Jerry Lundegaard; and bumbling bad guys à la those played in the original film by Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare. But the series takes as its inspiration the whole of the Coenverse, referencing and remixing characters, themes and aesthetics from films like “Raising Arizona,” “Miller’s Crossing” and “No Country for Old Men” — as well as “Fargo,” of course — in original stories the tend to center on the evil deeds of stupid men.It has been three years since the last season of “Fargo.” With the new one about to premiere and the other four available on Hulu, here is a look at the who, what, where and you betcha of “Fargo,” season by season.Billy Bob Thornton was nominated for an Emmy for his role in the first season of “Fargo.”Chris Large/FX, via Associated PressSeason 1(April–June 2014)“Your problem is you spent your whole life thinking there are rules. There aren’t.” — Lorne MalvoSet in 2006, Season 1 shifts the Jerry character into the form of Lester Nygaard (Martin Freeman), an insurance salesman who crosses paths with a sociopathic hit man named Lorne Malvo (Billy Bob Thornton), shades of Javier Bardem’s terrifying Anton Chigurh in “No Country for Old Men.”After Lester kills his wife and Lorne helps cover it up, Deputy Molly Solverson (Allison Tolman) of the Bemidji, Minn., police department, investigates the increasingly violent case, assisted by the wonderfully named officer Gus Grimly (Colin Hanks) of Duluth. All four of the lead actors received Emmy nominations and “Fargo” won best limited series, the only season so far to do so.Bokeem Woodbine, right, was part of an impressive cast in the second season (with Brad Mann).Chris Large/FXSeason 2(October–December 2015)“And isn’t that a minor miracle? State of the world today and the level of conflict and misunderstanding. That two men could stand on a lonely road in winter and talk. Calmly and rationally. While all around them, people are losing their minds.” — Mike MilliganThe second season of “Fargo” was more ambitious than the first, moving the action back to 1979 and expanding the scope of the show. With shots that echo “No Country for Old Men” and “Barton Fink,” and even an alien subplot that recalls “The Man Who Wasn’t There,” this season uses the entire Coen filmography as a sandbox while maintaining a centerpiece that is still very “Fargo.”The protagonists are again ordinary people caught in a violent world when Peggy (Kirsten Dunst) and Ed Blumquist (Jesse Plemons) cover up her hit-and-run accident. The problem is the guy Peggy hit is the son of Floyd Gerhardt (Jean Smart), the new head of a North Dakota crime family in a battle of wills with a Kansas City crime syndicate looking to expand their reach. (The role helped to return Smart to prominence.) Patrick Wilson plays Lou Solverson, the Minnesota state trooper who stumbles into all of it, assisted by his father-in-law, Sheriff Hank Larsson (Ted Danson).Bokeem Woodbine, who plays the Kansas City enforcer Mike Milligan, leads an exceptional supporting cast that also includes Cristin Milioti, Brad Garrett, Jeffrey Donovan, Rachel Keller, Angus Sampson, Nick Offerman and Zahn McClarnon. The second season of “Fargo” received 18 Emmy nominations.Ewan McGregor, left, played twin brothers in the third season. With Michael Stuhlbarg, center, and David Thewlis.Chris Large/FXSeason 3(April–June 2017)“The problem is not that there is evil in the world, the problem is that there is good. Because otherwise, who would care?” — V.M. VargaIs it still “Fargo” if none of it takes place in North Dakota? The third season moves the action to 2010-11 and takes place entirely in Minnesota. The protagonist lawman this time is the wonderful Gloria Burgle (Carrie Coon), who gets caught in a battle between twin brothers Ray and Emmit Stussy, both played by Ewan McGregor.When Ray, a probation officer, collaborates with his girlfriend, Nikki (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), to steal a rare postage stamp from his brother, mistaken identity leads to a bystander getting murdered. Emmit, powerful businessman, has his own problems as he tries to escape from a mysterious stranger named V.M. Varga (David Thewlis). Michael Stuhlbarg, Shea Whigham, Hamish Linklater, and Scoot McNairy co-star.Tommaso Ragno, left, and Chris Rock played rival crime bosses in the fourth season, which moved the action to Kansas City.Elizabeth Morris/FXSeason 4(September–November 2020)“You know why America loves a crime story? Because America IS a crime story” — Josto FaddaThe most ambitious season of “Fargo” also arguably feels the least like the others, moving south all the way to Kansas City and unfolding in 1950-51. More interested in the structures that allow for abuses of power, it serves as a kind of origin story for the crime syndicates seen in previous seasons. But it is also a commentary on race, privilege and the kind of criminal operations that destroy basic decency.Chris Rock stars as Loy Cannon, a new crime boss who goes to war with Kansas City’s Italian mafia. Jessie Buckley gives one of the season’s strongest performances as Oraetta Mayflower, a nurse who commits a murder that sets fire to the entire turf war unfolding between the two syndicates. Jason Schwartzman also stands out as Josto Fadda, the heir to the Italian crime family, and other co-stars include Ben Whishaw, Jack Huston, Andrew Bird, Glynn Turman and Emyri Crutchfield.In the new season, Juno Temple, left, plays a crafty housewife and Jennifer Jason Leigh plays her mother-in-law.Michelle Faye/FX, via Associated PressSeason 5(November 2023–January 2024)“With all due respect, we’ve got our own reality.” — Danish GravesThe 10-episode new season of “Fargo” returns to the show’s roots, both physically and narratively. The premiere includes more direct references to the film than any other episode in the show’s history, including masked intruders attempting a home invasion, a criminal with a giant face wound and even a cop who speaks of a “beautiful day.”With this season, Hawley inverts the victim role of the film, making Temple’s endangered housewife, Dot, someone who is capable of fending for herself. Hamm plays against type as a vicious sheriff with a grudge. Jennifer Jason Leigh, who starred in the Coens’ “The Hudsucker Proxy,” is all cruel calculation as Dot’s wealthy mother-in-law, Lorraine Lyon, and Dave Foley plays the family’s lawyer and fixer, Danish Graves. Lamorne Morris and Richa Moorjani team up as investigating officers who get stuck in the violent middle. More

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    Best Movies and TV Shows Streaming in November: ‘Invincible,’ ‘Fargo’ and More

    The Rock & Roll Hall of Fame ceremony will be live-streamed, and “Julia,” “Fargo” and more return. “The Buccaneers” is among the new series out this month.Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of November’s most promising new titles. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)New to Amazon Prime Video‘Invincible’ Season 2, Part 1Starts streaming: Nov. 3Season 1 of this ultraviolent superhero cartoon (based on a comic book series by “The Walking Dead” creator Robert Kirkman) introduced the title character: a teenager still developing and honing the superpowers he inherited from his space-alien father. Steven Yeun voices Invincible, a.k.a. Mark Grayson, who at the end of last season learned that his dad, Omni-Man (J.K. Simmons), had been serving as one of the Earth’s protectors while secretly paving the way for a future invasion by his own planet’s people. Season 2 picks up in the aftermath of that revelation, as Mark and his fellow heroes face a series of new supervillains while also strategizing for Omni-Man’s possible return. Though “Invincible” has dark moments, the show’s overall vibe is bright and entertaining, with enough nods to classic superhero tropes to please devoted comics readers.Also arriving:Nov. 10“007: Road to a Million” Season 1“Dina Hashem: Dark Little Whispers”Nov. 14“Trevor Wallace: Pterodactyl”Nov. 17“Ex-mas”“Maxine’s Baby: The Tyler Perry Story”“Twin Love” Season 1Nov. 21“Bye Bye Barry”Nov. 29“Pretty Hard Cases”Anna Sawai in “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.”Diyah Pera/Apple TV+New to Apple TV+‘The Buccaneers’ Season 1Starts streaming: Nov. 8Based on Edith Wharton’s final novel — left unfinished when she died in 1937 — “The Buccaneers” explores the flowering of the late-19th-century American aristocracy. Like the book, the series is about a group of wealthy young women who go to London to take part in the debutante season, invited by some established British families who want to lure these ladies (and their money) into marriages with cash-poor dukes and lords. Kristine Froseth takes the series’ lead as Nan St. George, the brightest of the Americans, who is supposed to be waiting in line for a husband behind her sister, Jinny (Imogen Waterhouse), but who instead finds herself courted by two men — Guy (Matthew Broome) and Theo (Guy Remmers) — who find her independence refreshing.‘For All Mankind’ Season 4Starts streaming: Nov. 10This terrific alternate-history science-fiction TV series had an uncharacteristically shaky third season, with its thrilling outer-space action — set mostly on Mars — butting up against some much drearier relationship melodrama. Season 4 resets “For All Mankind” a bit, introducing new characters and kicking off a new story, set in the 2000s. These episodes see multiple private and government space agencies working together on ambitious areas of exploration, including tapping asteroids for their mineral resources. At the same time, issues with the existing infrastructures on the Moon and Mars create a fresh set of practical problems for our heroes to solve. Newcomers to the cast include Toby Kebbel as a former oil-rigger looking for work away from Earth and Daniel Stern as a former corporate chief executive trying to bring efficiency to NASA.‘Monarch: Legacy of Monsters’ Season 1Starts streaming: Nov. 17This first live-action TV series set in the recent “Godzilla” and “King Kong” movies’ “MonsterVerse” divides its action between two eras: the 1950s, when the existence of giant creatures is still a closely guarded secret, and the present, where some cities have built underground shelters to withstand Godzilla attacks. Anna Sawai plays Cate, who goes looking for the truth about her father’s connection to the mysterious monster-studying Monarch agency. Wyatt Russell and Kurt Russell both play Lee Shaw, who became involved with Monarch as a U.S. soldier in the 1950s — and who a half-century later may be the only one who can help Cate. The creator Chris Black, who developed the show with the writer Matt Fraction, uses footage from the MonsterVerse films to add a sense of scope and awe to a series that is as much about the humans than it is about the big beasts looking to stomp them.Also arriving:Nov. 3“Fingernails”Nov. 22“The Velveteen Rabbit”Disney+New to Disney+‘The 2023 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony’Starts streaming: Nov. 3After years of HBO airing a recorded and edited version of the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame’s annual induction ceremony, this year Disney+ has the rights to the event, and will be broadcasting it live and uncut. The 2023 inductees, some of whom will be performing, include Kate Bush, Sheryl Crow, Missy Elliott, Chaka Khan, Willie Nelson and Rage Against the Machine. Presenters include Carrie Underwood, Common, Ice-T, Queen Latifah and Sia. These ceremonies do last a while, but they also tend to be full of emotional moments and genuine surprises, so for pop music buffs who can’t see the show in person, this is a rare chance to watch the action unfold as it happens — and then to watch it again later, in the Disney+ catalog.Also arriving:Nov. 1“Behind the Attraction” Season 2“The Three Detectives”Nov. 8“Daddies on Request” Season 2“The Santa Clauses” Season 2Nov. 17“Dashing Through the Snow”Nov. 23“The Naughty Nine”Emma Corrin and Harris Dickinson in “A Murder at the End of the World.”Christopher Saunders/FXNew to Hulu‘A Murder at the End of the World’Starts streaming: Nov. 14The writer-director-producer team of Zal Batmanglij and Brit Marling are best-known for their Netflix supernatural mystery series “The OA,” which was canceled before Batmanglij and Marling could finish the story. They are staying in the same genre for this mini-series, which puts the duo’s usual spacey spin on the “country house murder mystery” plot. Clive Owen plays an eccentric tech billionaire who invites a group of influential thought leaders to his magnificent resort hotel in an icy wasteland. The one guest who does not seem to fit in with the rest is Darby Hart (Emma Corrin), a skilled hacker and amateur detective who wrote a popular true crime book. When someone on the property turns up dead, Darby has to find the killer and also convince her fellow partygoers that something strange is going on — all while she reckons with some secrets from her own past.‘Fargo’ Season 5Starts streaming: Nov. 22After a long layoff, Noah Hawley’s offbeat crime series “Fargo” is back, with 10 more episodes set (very loosely) in the same blood-spattered “Minnesota nice” reality as Joel and Ethan Coen’s Oscar-winning 1996 movie. Previous seasons took place in 1950, 1979, 2006 and 2010. The fifth season takes place in 2019, and stars Juno Temple as Dot, a seemingly ordinary housewife who gets in trouble with the law and sees her shady past catching up to her, in the form of an authoritarian right-wing sheriff (Jon Hamm) determined to catch her. Jennifer Jason Leigh plays Dot’s mother-in-law, an icy collection agency magnate who usually leans on her lawyer (Dave Foley) to get her family members out of trouble — but who has no idea what she is dealing with in the sweet but deadly Dot.Also arriving:Nov. 1“Arthdal Chronicles: The Sword of Aramun”“Black Cake”“A Christmas Frequency”“Reporting for Christmas”Nov. 2“Pam’s Garden of Eden” Season 2“Magic Mike’s Last Dance”Nov. 3“L.A. Law” Seasons 1-8“Quiz Lady”Nov. 6“JFK: One Day in America”Nov. 8“Vigilante” Season 1Nov. 9“The Croods: Family Tree” Season 8“The League”Nov. 13“The Lady Bird Diaries”Nov. 15“Brawn: The Impossible Formula 1 Story”Nov. 16“Black Ice”“Drive with Swiss Beatz”“The Secret Life of Dancing Dogs”Nov. 20“Incredible Animal Journeys”“The Last Rider”“My Hero Academia” Season 6, Part 2Nov. 21“Obituary” Season 1Nov. 26“Faraway Downs”Nov. 29“The Artful Dodger” Season 1Nov. 30“A Compassionate Spy”“Wild Crime” Season 3Sarah Lancashire and David Hyde Pierce in Season 2 of “Julia.”Sebastein Gonon/MaxNew to Max‘Julia’ Season 2Starts streaming: Nov. 16Season 1 of this delightful biographical dramedy was one of last year’s unexpected TV gems, thanks in large part to Sarah Lancashire’s luminous performance as the boisterous, can-do cooking instructor Julia Child, coupled with David Hyde Pierce’s warm, wry take on her supportive husband, Paul. The first season was all about how the Childs committed their time, energy and money toward realizing their dream of creating a public television show that could demystify and popularize French food. In Season 2, Julia has become an unlikely celebrity, and she and Paul have to fight to maintain the quality of their show while all the people who doubted them before come running to cash in on their success.Also arriving:Nov. 3“Scent of Time”Nov. 7“Stand Up & Shout: Songs from a Philly High School”Nov. 8“You Were My First Boyfriend”Nov. 11“Albert Brooks: Defending My Life”Nov. 13“Love Has Won”Nov. 14“How We Get Free”Nov. 28“South to Black Power”Nov. 30“Bookie” Season 1David Oyelowo in “Lawmen: Bass Reeves.”Emerson Miller/Paramount+New to Paramount+ with Showtime‘Lawmen: Bass Reeves’Starts streaming: Nov. 5The first installment of a new true crime anthology series — with each season telling the story of some famous cop or crook — “Lawmen: Bass Reeves” stars David Oyelowo as Reeves, the western hero who in his life went from being enslaved on a Texas plantation to serving with distinction as a U.S. Marshal. Oyelowo is also an executive producer (as is the “Yellowstone” creator Taylor Sheridan) on this historical drama that stretches across decades, covering an eventful life that overlapped with some of the biggest social changes in America: from the end of the Civil War to the expansion of the frontier. Created by the writer-producer Chad Feehan, this first season of “Lawmen” looks at classic Western mythology through different eyes, considering what ideals like freedom and justice mean to someone born in chains.‘The Curse’Starts streaming: Nov. 10The comedian Nathan Fielder has spoofed reality TV throughout his career, and especially in his series “Nathan for You” and “The Rehearsal.” His latest project — cocreated with the filmmaker Benny Safdie — takes a different approach to the genre, via a fictional story with a serrated satirical edge. Fielder plays Asher Siegel, who alongside his wife, Whitney (Emma Stone), is shooting an HGTV show called “Flipanthropy,” in which the couple helps the struggling residents of a small New Mexico town move into cutting-edge eco-friendly houses. When a young street peddler puts a curse on the stingy Asher, the Siegels’ marriage and television collaboration both begin to suffer. A commentary on the contrived rosiness of home improvement shows, “The Curse” also touches on gentrification, xenophobia, and the deep need of some do-gooder types to be lauded for their largess, even when their efforts hurt more than help.Also arriving:Nov. 1“Ink Master” Season 15Nov. 7“De La Calle”Nov. 9“Colin from Accounts”Nov. 22“Good Burger 2” More

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    Jessie Buckley’s Monster Talent

    According to the teachings of the paduan theater artist Giovanni Fusetti, one of the great clowning masters in the world, the Italian word folle, as in il Folle, “the Fool,” comes from the Latin word follis, which means the bellows, that implement that gathers and directs air toward flame to feed it. The Fool, he says, is like the bellows: full of air, full of breath, full of spirits and full of feeling. Fools talk of everything and nothing, the silly and the profound, and their ability to talk freely without much culpability makes them fonts of truth. Their words propel plots and topple kingdoms. Conduits of air, of inspiration, are implements of ignition. Fusetti is known as the midwife of clowns. The theory goes that everyone has a clown inside, and instead of inventing it or imposing it, you simply coax it forth. The process of learning to clown is in fact the process of finding your inner clown, the part of the self that is full of inspiration and raw emotion, the part most in touch with the fact that “we understand nothing and we feel everything,” as Fusetti said in a 2019 interview. “The clown feels that life is beautiful and tragic.” The Irish actor Jessie Buckley — best known for roles that have placed her variously at the mercy of horrid vicars, mythological monsters, serial-killer boyfriends, ghost rapists, abusive husbands, nuclear disasters, warring dynasties and unseemly hungers — is currently fascinated with clowning and is an admirer of Fusetti’s, with whom she trained in Padua this year. This doesn’t quite track with her résumé, but it makes sense to the people who know her, or the people who understand clowning to be about, as Fusetti describes it, “the extreme sport of being alive.”“The first thing he has you do is carve your nose,” Buckley said. We were walking around a residential neighborhood of Toronto on an unseasonably warm day in October, kicking leaves. Buckley was on a break from the set of “Fingernails,” a new film she was shooting with the director Christos Nikou. “You have a red ball, like a play ball, and how you carve your clown nose is very important because it has to fit your nose perfectly.” Once you carve your nose and mount it on your face, you do an exercise in which you come into the world as a clown, as if seeing everything for the very first time — with the nose on. She found the exercise extraordinary in the way it surfaced people’s clowns. She is curious, however, about clowns’ relegation to a marginal art form. “They used to be in the core of society. They used to be, like in the Fool in ‘King Lear,’ you know, they were the ones kind of exposing the wounds in society.”I asked if her clown spoke. “Mine didn’t yet. Some clowns do. My clown was a very — well, I had kind of two clowns, but — she was a child. She was a very young clown.” She smiled. “And she was in utter awe of the world. And wants to get so close to it — but was terrified of getting that close as well.” Buckley rummaged in her pocket.“Here,” she said, holding out her phone. “That’s her.”There was Buckley, swallowed in a black oversize men’s coat and loose black pants. Her feet were bare, and her hands were lost somewhere in her coat sleeves. She looked hapless, amazed, delighted.“OK,” I said. “What was your other clown?” She smiled again lopsidedly. “Just mischievous.”Wonder and mischief, as twin temperamental undercurrents, form the complex charisma that Buckley brings to her work. She has an affinity for harrowing roles, which she then infuses with fierce vibrancy, wit and unexpected lightness. This year she has starred in two films that she has come to think of as a diptych: the folk horror film “Men,” directed by Alex Garland, and “Women Talking,” directed by Sarah Polley. In each film, Buckley portrays women who navigate the commingling of desire, pain, fear and awe. Her performances force us to consider how we can live with respect for the fact of human life’s murkiness. “In a way they were for me in dialogue with each other,” Buckley said about the two films, “Men,” with its male cast and a male director, and “Women Talking,” with its female cast and a female director. Each in its own way tried to get at the heart of a seemingly ancient monstrosity that can exist between men and women, one that necessarily exists alongside love. She wanted to put herself at the center. “Where is the wound?” she said. “I feel like I need, I want to understand the monster.”Buckley in “Women Talking.” Orion Pictures, via Everett Collection“I just don’t think since Marlon Brando or Robert De Niro that there’s been this kind of pure power coupled with this fierce intelligence,” Polley told me. “She’s just got this, like, atomic power that comes out of her.” On the set for “Women Talking,” Polley explained, they erected a large screen outside the main set — a hayloft — that functioned as a monitor. One day Polley found a group of people clustered around it. “It was a bunch of locations people and a few drivers, and a lot of the Covid team and P.A.s were all around the screen.” She asked what they were doing, and someone answered, “Whenever we hear you’ve turned around on Jessie, we all run in.” Polley was startled — she had never seen anything like that before. These were seasoned crew members who do several blockbuster movies a year, and who had no particular interest in “Women Talking” or its subject. But Buckley was like a magnet, she said. “They just didn’t want to miss a second of watching that pure explosion of power that happens when she’s onscreen or where the surprise is, what the hell she’s going to do next.”What did she feel couldn’t be said? ‘Female … desire. Female hunger, female bodies, female intellect — yeah, a female hunger.’“Women Talking,” adapted from the novel by Miriam Toews, is based on a true story. A community of Mennonite women spend years living with a gruesome mystery: They wake up in the mornings brutalized, apparently raped in the night, but with no memory of the violation. Their religious leaders insist that the phenomenon must be caused by ghosts or demons, but then the women discover that it was their own men, their husbands, fathers and sons, attacking them with the help of cow tranquilizers. The movie centers on a small group of the women gathering in a hayloft to debate how they will respond to this discovery. Buckley plays Mariche, a woman with a husband so violent that the mere mention of his name pales the faces of everyone in the room. Both Mariche and her young daughter have been attacked in the night; still, she is initially pessimistic that there’s anything to be done about it. Buckley plays Mariche in a way that highlights her deep fear, her biting honesty, her self-sacrificing courage, all of which are wrapped in a rage that’s practically radioactive.Polley was considering Buckley for a few of the characters in the film; it was Buckley who chose Mariche. This surprised Polley: Mariche is the hardest part. She’s meanspirited, funny, caustic. She mocks others’ vulnerabilities; in one scene, she berates another woman who is having a panic attack, complaining that none of the other women’s traumas have manifested in a way that demands so much attention. She laughs at the idea that women so sheltered as they are could possibly make their way in the world. Polley described Mariche as an obstacle to progress for much of the story. She has internalized much of the violence to which she has been subjected, and she finds herself spitting it back at others. Polley asked Buckley why she chose Mariche; Buckley told her it was because Mariche frightened her. In Mariche, Buckley told me, she saw “the kind of internalized monster,” the way that Mariche’s cruelty had been planted in her “from a legacy and archetype that goes way back, that has been given to her by her mother, and given to her by her husband, and given to her probably by her own children.” Reflecting on this dynamic during another conversation, she elaborated. “But I think the more interesting thing than that is about how, within violence — how people try to emancipate themselves from it or move out of it.”Maggie Gyllenhaal described to me something her husband, Peter Sarsgaard, said about Buckley after acting with her in “The Lost Daughter”: “She’s buoyant.” Gyllenhaal agreed. “She’s full of life, and it floats her back up to, like, where the light is,” Gyllenhaal said. “Even though she’s totally interested and curious and powerful enough to swim down in the depths of the darkest places, she’s going to emerge full of life in one way or another, including all the darkness and the pain and the perversity.” The clown goes down to the depths and then floats back up to the clouds. Buckley was born in a small town, Killarney, the oldest of four sisters and one brother. Her parents encouraged Buckley’s creativity, and she wound up in the school plays at her all-girls Catholic school, often playing the boys’ parts, like Tony in “West Side Story.” She remains close with her family, but she talks about those years as fraught with existential dread. All the life paths readily available to her seemed unmanageably constricted. She couldn’t imagine a future for herself; she felt trapped.“When I was a teenager, there was a lot of what I felt, especially as a woman, that wasn’t allowed to be said,” she told me. “I sometimes felt like I was going to explode, like I was too much. There was all this feeling in me — I felt so much, and it felt like it was being kept so quietly and tightly.”What did she feel couldn’t be said, I wanted to know, and she paused to find her words. “Female … desire. Female hunger, female bodies, female intellect — yeah, a female hunger. I felt like everybody was starving around me. And in a way, if you were starving, you were doing great. In order to join the world, you must starve and be smaller than yourself, and then you’ll be palatable. Internally, I was exploding.” When, as a teenager, she felt depressed and frustrated, she dove into old films, obsessing over Katharine Hepburn or Judy Garland. At 17, she applied to drama school and was rejected, bringing that dream to a halt.The next day, she decided to audition for the reality talent show “I’d Do Anything,” in which young actresses competed for the role of Nancy in a West End production of the musical “Oliver!” The footage of this competition is still on YouTube, and in it, teenage Buckley stands center stage week after week with her moussed spray of red curls and wide gold hoop earrings, doing something that can only be described in clichés: singing her heart out, singing for her life. Her voice was applauded, but she was criticized repeatedly for what the judges perceived as overly ‘’masculine” body language — she was coached to “be more ladylike” and to “get your womanly head on.” I looked back at the footage and found this assessment of her physicality to be bizarre, not to mention sexist. It seems, in retrospect, like another expression of the kind of rigidity around “palatable” displays of womanhood Buckley has spent her adult life reimagining. It’s not footage she seems to enjoy re-encountering. She was clearly a talent — she was Andrew Lloyd Webber’s favorite — but also just an earnest teenager gamely belting one power ballad after another, voice clean as brass. Still, there’s a blueprint of the present-day Buckley there: a certain urgency that comes through in her performances. When she sings “As Long as He Needs Me,” she looks hungry, as if she could swallow the whole world and it wouldn’t be enough. When she was filming “The Lost Daughter” during the pandemic, Buckley says Gyllenhaal developed a habit of whispering images and notions into her ear when they were between takes. What Buckley remembers her whispering most was, “You’re starving, you’re absolutely starving.” The film is based on an Elena Ferrante novel about an academic who abandons her young daughters to pursue a love affair and the space to write — a choice she looks back on decades later with mixed feelings. The film shows the protagonist, Leda, in both eras of her life: suffocating under the weight of early motherhood and domestic obligation, and reflecting on her life as an older woman vacationing alone. The older Leda is played by Olivia Colman; Buckley plays Leda the young mother, desperately in love with her children but even more desperate to get away from them. The movie probes the taboo of a mother whose needs don’t align with those of her children and, facing that conflict, chooses herself. Leda calls herself an “unnatural” mother. This self-accusation is undermined by the tenderness and pathos with which Buckley plays her. Buckley’s Leda is tired and trapped, but also playful, loving, dutiful. She resists villainization. She holds her children as if she never wants to let them go — until she lets them go. Who wouldn’t want what she wants — more time to think and write, to sleep with Peter Sarsgaard? Buckley said she loved the opportunity Gyllenhaal gave her to “be curious about what is maybe a version of what motherhood or womanhood might actually mean, not something that’s just palatable. The unspoken truth of what it is to be a woman and to actually really take a bite of the apple. And relish it. And not apologize for it.” If there is a thread connecting Buckley’s early work, it’s her taste for playing women who want something they are not supposed to want. In “Beast,” her 2017 film debut, Buckley plays Moll, a 20-something who is so desperate to get away from her controlling mother that she begins a relationship with a man she comes to suspect is behind a string of local rape-murders of young girls. In “Wild Rose,” often thought of as her breakout role, she plays a 24-year-old Scottish woman recently released from prison who is desperate to be a country singer in Nashville, a dream she struggles to subordinate to the needs of her two young children. In the HBO mini-series “Chernobyl,” she plays the pregnant wife of a firefighter who responds to the nuclear explosion; she chooses to be with her husband as he dies despite being warned that his body is radioactive and dangerous to her pregnancy, a choice that costs her the child. In Season 4 of the TV series “Fargo,” she plays a cheerful Minnesotan nurse who, calling herself an “angel of mercy,” surreptitiously kills her patients. In a 2020 filmed production of “Romeo and Juliet” for the National Theater, she plays an earthy, forceful Juliet with an adult sense of what she wants. These women might be seen by others as morally compromised — certainly the nurse is — but maybe more to the point is that they’re intentionally colliding with the most complicated aspects of human agency.In “Men,” Buckley plays Harper, a young widow who takes a solo retreat to a manor in the English countryside, where she is slowly hunted — or haunted — by a series of male archetypes: a policeman who disbelieves her; a vicar who accuses her of stirring his lust; a silent, naked figure covered in leaves, meant to evoke the Green Man, a pagan figure with a face covered by foliage, who symbolizes the cycle of life and death. For two and a half hours, Buckley is mostly alone onscreen with these many men who attack her, mock her, flash her, lurk outside her windows, gaslight her, blame her. (All of them are played by one actor, Rory Kinnear, with the exception of Harper’s dead husband, who is played in flashbacks by Paapa Essiedu.) Among other things, the movie is an allegorical recitation of all the ways men have ever brutalized women. Buckley in “Men.”A24, via Everett CollectionThe film is tough, obviously, and gruesome in a way — but it also has a soaring feeling, or perhaps it’s better to say that Buckley as Harper is full of awe and pleasure, both fight and spiritual flight. There’s a scene in which she is alone in the woods staring down the barrel of a dark, abandoned railway tunnel. It’s foreboding, pitch black, precisely the kind of passage you hope the woman in the horror movie comes to her senses in time to avoid entering. Harper lingers on the edge of the darkness, looking alert, apprehensive. Then she sings a quick note, sending it into the dark. It comes back as an echo. She smiles and does it again, and then again, singing calls and responses until the tunnel is duetting with her, wrapping them together in song.I’ve been meditating on Buckley’s choice of words, to “really take a bite of the apple.” That original sin — an ancient, biblical act — is unequivocally a disobedience, but it is also a foundationally human gesture: to expand oneself no matter what it costs, to demand the right to see the world as it really is, to eat what is delicious. The forces opposing this kind of act are fierce. In “Men,” one of the first things Harper sees upon her arrival to the country house is a tree teeming with apples in the front courtyard. She takes one on her way in, closing her eyes to enjoy it. A few minutes later, the house’s landlord, touring her around the home, sees the apple with a missing bite, and his face darkens. “No no no no no. Mustn’t do that. Forbidden fruit.” In a moment he will tell her he is kidding, but in the intervening seconds, as Harper begins to stammer an apology, she looks genuinely afraid. After we concluded our walk, I headed for the airport, and Buckley went to work: She had an evening of script review to attend. Still, before I made it home, she managed to send via email and text a shower of things she loves: a video of a Georgian men’s choir sitting around a table crowded with beer and thick sandwiches and bowls of waxy fruit, singing a Christmas carol (“I would give my clown’s nose to be a fly on the wall at that Christmas dinner,” she wrote); a playlist of songs that she has been returning to for the last two years; a book of works by Peter Birkhauser, who painted from his dreams; a Richard Brautigan novel; a more recent novel by Kiran Millwood Hargrave about a 17th-century Norwegian village where all the men died, leaving the women alone. Later, she sent me Joni Mitchell’s song “Little Green.” “Good auld Joni to crack the heart wide open,” she wrote. She signed off, “Big huge love.” From a different person, especially an actor under observation, I might have dismissed this as disingenuous. But Buckley seems to move in a spirit of abundance. She wrapped me, upon first meeting face to face, in a big huge hug while wearing a big huge puffer coat. She was full of big huge questions. (“Do you have dreams for yourself, for what comes next, as an artist and as a woman?” she wanted to know.) Her laughter is full-bodied. “Her laugh just takes over every space in the most glorious way,” Polley told me. “When I think of those times in that hayloft, we were dealing with such difficult subject matter, but one of my main memories is Jessie’s laugh and how infectious and contagious it is — how once Jessie starts laughing, everybody starts laughing, because it’s like with her whole self.” Frances McDormand told me that when Buckley arrived on set for “Women Talking,” “she immediately found a place in town that had bulk nut supplies. I guess she eats a lot of nuts — and so she brought everybody bags of nuts.” McDormand snorted with laughter. “She’s just — she’s just a good ’un.” McDormand also told me she recognized herself as an actor in Buckley. I pressed her on it, but she didn’t know how to be more specific. Gyllenhaal said something similar, telling me that she felt that Buckley was “somehow artistically like a sister.” The repetition struck me, but it didn’t exactly surprise me. One reason I have found Buckley so hard to look away from onscreen, no matter what her characters are enduring, is that she seems familiar to me, too. Her hunger is recognizable.Her current project in Toronto is a dystopian sci-fi romance about an institute that can measure, based on a sample of someone’s fingernails, whether you are 100 percent in love with your partner. Buckley plays a woman who is in a “100 percent previously tested relationship” certified via fingernail but who finds herself wondering whether what she’s experiencing really is love in its totality. “That hundred percent isn’t necessarily — it doesn’t feed her enough,” Buckley said, laughing. She has been listening to a lot of Peggy Lee’s “Is This All There Is?” It’s a jaunty, plucky song about a woman facing the worst, watching her house burn down and thinking, Is that all there is to a fire? I pointed out to Buckley on our walk that most people prefer not to spend their time imaginatively inhabiting the most unsettling contradictions of human desire, or confronting humanity’s ugliest responses to it.“I mean, I’m drawn to it.” She laughed. “And sometimes that’s scary. I can’t help it. I don’t know why,” she said. “But don’t you think it’s healthier, instead of denying our reality, that we live and die, and there’s pain, and there is damage, and there’s also a huge amount of love, and there’s hope, and there’s fear, and there’s institutes, and there’s chaos, there’s … ?” She shook her head, as if stunned. “Like, what the hell are you doing if you’re not, like, standing in the middle of it?” And it comes out one way or the other, she argued. Refusing to attend to the wounds won’t make them go away. What she noticed, working on “Women Talking,” is that “the violence is almost like air. You know, it’s always around, but it never actually presents itself. It’s something that’s continuous.” The women cannot isolate the evil behind what’s happened to them to one man; they can’t even only blame the men. The monster is everywhere, even behind the faces of people they love. It’s in some of their religious teachings; it’s in the ways they were taught by their parents. It’s in them, the women, too. The women are considering whether to stay and fight for change or to leave, a choice that would be made much more difficult because they were forbidden as children to learn how to read, or even to know where they were in the world. Most of them have never even seen a map. This, too, is a kind of violence, the women realize. Their way out, they have decided, is to look at the problem directly and to talk about it. What they will do next — whether that’s changing their culture or leaving it — requires inventing a conception of the world, and of their place in it, that they cannot even begin to fathom. They’re engaged, one woman says, in “an act of wild female imagination.” This phrase — wild female imagination — was used by their religious leaders to dismiss the assaults as fiction, to claim that the violence was all in the women’s minds. Now the women will adopt those words, and their wild minds, for a different purpose.That feeling, of pushing toward a better, bigger way of being in the world that you can only barely imagine, is familiar to Buckley. What she likes about clowning, Buckley told me, is the presence it demands. “Proper clowns are so alive,” she said. “The best part of clowning is it happens in the moment,” and failure is as likely as transcendence — the two things are bound up with each other. In images, the archetype of the Fool is often depicted balancing at the edge of a cliff, one foot hovering out over the abyss, suspended in the possibility of both fall and flight. There’s an openness to possibility, no matter what the outcome may be. “I love it,” Buckley said, pausing over every word for emphasis, a look of pure glee on her face.Jordan Kisner is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of the essay collection “Thin Places.” More