8 I couldn't help wondering as soon as I heard the title how this movie would relate to Fargo, its most recent predecessor set almost entirely in Minnesota. Other than the locations (which are not nearly as clearly drawn here), the violence and the obscene language of most of its characters, they have little in common. Gone are the rib-poking send-up of Minnesota dialect and lifestyle—these characters can best be described as speaking middle American English. Gone are the bleak, forever white winter landscapes; this film takes place in the in-between fall or spring; that too is unspecified. And this is a fiction where Fargo is a dramatized history.

But the main thing they have in common is a worldview that emphasizes the bleakness of life without a center or an afterlife. The central female character in this film, "Freddie," played by Cameron Diaz, explains to Keanu Reeves' character: "You're dying, Jacks. I'm dying. Hear the watch? Every tick gets louder." Or as St. Paul (not the one in Minnesota) put it, "if there's no rising from the dead, eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die."

On that basic existential theme—the meaning(lessness) of life with no Creator—this is the best movie—the most engaging and compelling—since Pulp Fiction. Keanu Reeves, whose very look is engaging and compelling, may be a large reason for that, because superficially there's a lot of nothing here. There's a lot of violent and dirty talk, a lot of fighting and gunslinging, and the characters are vacuous people whose empty lives are bracketed by video arcade-night club carousing-boozing and drugs and the kind of edgy and sometimes exciting but ultimately insignificant circles of activity—which Freddie describes as "oranges"—that occupy such lives.

The film starts with Johnny Cash's unmistakeable voice: "Hello, I'm Johnny Cash," followed by his well-known popular song, "Ring of Fire," and the credit-setup suggests that this movie is about life as the ring of fire. In the end, the film's solution for the meaninglessness of life-as-hot-carousel is the cheap romanticism that most moviegoers love. Reeves' Jacks is a young man who has never known happiness, doesn't believe it's possible, and once he experiences it, is transformed by it. That's the easy out; the movie ends on a high note.

But you get the feeling that you're not getting the whole truth here; the movie is over but the end is not yet. Because romance is, as everyone knows, at best only a temporary savior. In accomplishing her dream of becoming a Las Vegas chorus girl, Freddie's best hope of immortality is to have her picture hanging on the livingroom wall like Jacks' mother's, and to end up dying just as ignominiously. Samuel Jackson's character may have found a better salvation in Pulp Fiction, but then cynics would say that kind—at least his take on it—is just another romance, too.

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