Fargo is worth dwelling on for a moment, because Carl Showalter is a more complex creation than he sometimes appears. The film is frequently summarized as a dark comedy, which is accurate, but the darkness is not uniformly ironic. Carl Showalter is funny because he is incompetent — his scheme keeps going wrong in ways he cannot anticipate — but he is also genuinely vicious, capable of real violence, and his death at the end of the film is not a comic resolution but something grimmer. Buscemi plays all of these qualities simultaneously, without hedging toward comedy when the character would be violent or toward menace when the character would be absurd. The result is a character who is recognizably human in an inhumane situation, which is a more difficult achievement than either pure comedy or pure menace would have been.
Trees Lounge, also 1996, demonstrated that his interest in character and place was something he brought to his own projects as well as to other people’s. The film, shot in Valley Stream with a cast that included Buscemi himself, John Costelloe, Carol Kane, Chloe Sevigny, and a range of character performers, is remarkable for its specificity: the diner, the bar, the suburban streets are rendered with the particular detail of someone who knows the place rather than someone who has scouted it as a location. The film’s unhurried tempo — its willingness to spend time with its characters in states that advance no plot but reveal character — is a distinctive quality that owes more to the European art cinema of the 1960s and 1970s than to the narrative conventions of mainstream American film.