3) “Well, I just don’t understand it.” – Fargo (1996)
Frances McDormand is a formidable talent, and with Fargo, she seized the opportunity to deliver a performance of absolute perfection. As Marge Gunderson, the heavily pregnant Minnesota Police Chief, she painstakingly investigates a series of local murders – eventually making the necessary connections to lead her to a rural address where she believes she will find a stolen car linked to the crimes. On arriving, she is greeted by gruesome the sight of one of the criminals – Gaear (Peter Stormare) – feeding the remains of another criminal – Carl (Steve Buscemi) – into a wood chipper. She confronts him, subdues him, makes an arrest and drives out toward the arriving law enforcement vehicles with the murderer in the back seat.
“So that was Mrs. Lundegaard on the floor in there. And I guess that was your accomplice in the wood chipper. And those three people in Brainerd. And for what? For a little bit of money. There’s more to life than a little money, you know. Don’t you know that? And here ya are, and it’s a beautiful day. Well, I just don’t understand it.”
In this brief summation, at the end of a script written by the directors – Joel and Ethan Coen – we truly see the world through the eyes of Marge Gunderson. Throughout the preceding 90 minutes, she shows herself to be a friendly, personable character, with a steely and persistent edge. Even though she is clearly nearing childbirth, she is never swayed from her pursuit of the truth – and yet, in these closing moments, we see a woman almost disappointed at the negativity and cynicism that has been dragged into her town by these criminals. As she quietly addresses the murderer sitting behind her, it seems as though she is almost thinking aloud. A man that has committed the most vicious of crimes begins to look crestfallen, and almost ashamed as she admonishes him in the smallest of voices – lamenting the utter pointlessness of it all. Academy Award-winning gold.
4) The USS Indianapolis – Jaws (1975)
Any film that sets the mark for the summer blockbuster better be good, and few action-packed thrill rides since Jaws have gotten close to its level of excitement and depth. While the shark – lovingly nicknamed Bruce by director Steven Spielberg, after his lawyer – is the star of the film, it is the fine character actor Robert Shaw who eats up more of the screen. As tough, grizzled, obsessive shark hunter Quint, Shaw offers a doozy of a tale at sea to his shipmates, Brody (Roy Scheider) and Hooper (Richard Dreyfus).
Shaw tells them of the harrowing day he was on the USS Indianapolis, which delivered part of the atomic bomb the Americans later dropped on Hiroshima. Even though the writers got the day of the ship’s sinking wrong, it matters little. When the Japanese torpedoed the ship on July 30, 1945, sharks were swarming in the dark waters beneath, and were one of the factors that killed several hundred men treading water. (Screenwriter John Milius, who would later write Apocalypse Now, based some of Quint’s memories on actual survivor testimony.)
Quint’s monologue is just about as frightening as the shark he is hunting, and the grounding of his backstory in true events raises the stakes of the character. When most people think of the sea captain character, they think of this speech, which goes mostly uninterrupted for three-and-a-half minutes. Shaw gives the scene a haunting texturing that makes the battle against the shark a more personal one.
It is hard to think of another spectacular summer film to have such an incredible speech pasted in the middle of the mayhem. Action producers thought all they needed to create a crowd-pleasing spectacle was a bigger boat, when in fact they just needed bigger screenwriting talent.
