Buscemi’s career is evidence that this hierarchy, while real, is not absolute. The interesting parts accumulate. They build a body of work that, viewed across time, reveals not a collection of supporting roles but a coherent artistic identity. Mr. Pink in Reservoir Dogs, Carl Showalter in Fargo, Garland Greene in Con Air, Rockhound in Armageddon, Donny in The Big Lebowski — these are not the same character, but they share a quality that is Buscemi’s: a combination of intelligence and anxiety, an ability to suggest that the character knows more about his situation than he is saying, a physicality that is not conventionally imposing but is consistently present.
The Coen Brothers, who used him in four films across the 1990s, understood this quality precisely. In Miller’s Crossing, he plays Eddie Dane’s lackey Mink, a small role in a complicated narrative. In Barton Fink, he has a cameo. In Fargo, he plays Carl Showalter, one of the two hapless criminals at the center of the story — a man whose viciousness is inseparable from his incompetence, whose plans keep failing in ways he cannot understand, and whose final fate, absorbed into a wood chipper in one of the most grimly comic sequences in American film history, is so extreme as to be almost absurd. In The Big Lebowski, he plays Donny Kerabatsos, the bowling partner who keeps asking questions at exactly the wrong moment and who dies, early in the film’s third act, of a heart attack brought on by the nihilists’ attack — a death that is genuinely sad, in the middle of a comedy, without being false to the film’s tone.