A SIMPLE PLAN 1998

“No man chooses evil because it is evil; 
he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.” 

                                                          Mary Wollstonecraft -1790

The plot of A Simple Plan initiates with the simplest of premises and most relatable of fantasies: found wealth. Three men hunting in the snowy woods of Minnesota happen upon a downed private plane in whose wreckage is discovered a dead pilot and a bag containing $4.4 million in cash. Reasoning that no one is likely to lose that kind of money without someone eventually coming to look for it, Hank (Bill Paxton), the most level-headed and intelligent of the trio, suggests they alert the authorities and hope for a reward. The two remaining discoverers--Jacob (Billy Bob Thornton), Hank’s slow-witted older brother, and Lou Brent Briscoe), Jacob’s equally slow-on-the-uptake best friend--motivated by chronic unemployment and an inability to fully grasp all that’s at stake, argue that such a sizable cash sum MUST mean the money is drug-related and therefore less likely to be reported as lost or missing. So they all vote and instead decide to keep the money, splitting it three ways. 

Bad Omen
A fox attacking a henhouse sets into motion events that appear at first glance to be good fortune, but the film's recurring visual motif of crows signals something entirely different

Hank, outnumbered, already an accomplice, and swayed by circumstances of his own—his job is dead-end and his expectant wife Sarah (Bridget Fonda) is due any day—agrees not to report the money on the proviso it remains in his possession and they do nothing until enough time has passed to assure no one is looking for it.

Sounds simple enough. 

The bad luck crow motif materializes in Hank and Sarah's home

But this is a contemporary morality tale. If good fortune is responsible for awarding this trio“The American Dream in a goddamn gym bag,” then their tragic flaw proves to be their inability to realize what a bad omen it is to have such a stroke of good luck come at the expense of someone’s life (the anonymous pilot of the downed plane). Once the deal to keep the money has been struck, it isn't long before the group (which has now come to include Sarah, exhibiting heretofore-untapped reservoirs of resourcefulness and guile) is beset by a veritable Pandora’s Box of setbacks born of bad judgment, greed, mistrust, and betrayal.

Bill Paxton as Hank Mitchell

Bridget Fonda as Sarah Mitchell

Billy Bob Thornton as Jacob Mitchell

Brent Briscoe as Lou Chambers 

Combine the intricate plotting of Alfred Hitchcock with the psychological complexity of Claude Chabrol, and you’ve got a pretty good idea of how deftly A Simple Plan mines both the suspense and moral ambiguity in this tale about a group of otherwise decent people entering into a hastily-conceived plot to stealth away a fortune in ill-gotten gains. But as much as unforeseen narrative twists make for a story full of roller-coaster thrill ride of obstacles, and grievous, sometimes fatal, errors in judgment; it’s the complicated, contradictory impulses of the various characters—their individual personalities, motivations, and interrelationships—that give the film its most compelling jolts of knots-in-the-stomach intensity.

Merging elements of the crime thriller, the heist film, and the murder mystery, A Simple Plan’s unique perspective distinguishes itself in never feeling as though the machinations of plot and genre are the forces moving the characters along. Everything that happens—even those events furthest beyond the scope of the expected, feel like the organic, inevitable consequence of the combustible, putting-out-fire-with-gasoline interactions of dissimilar individuals forced by circumstance into an unlikely, unlucky alliance.

Three on a Match

WHAT I LOVE ABOUT THIS FILM

I can't say I'm all that familiar with the work of Sam Raimi. Fans of the director will cite his series of Evil Dead cult films, but of the director’s to-date 15 feature film releases, I’ve seen only The Gift (2000) and Spiderman (2002), neither making much of an impression on me. So A Simple Plan,  to my way of thinking, a practically perfect crime suspense thriller, exists in a pristine little bubble. I can enjoy it as a free-standing work of distinction, without having to attribute any of its merits to director trademarks or signs of a talent maturing.

Happy New Year

I don't recall being interested in seeing A Simple Plan during its theatrical run, but on the strength of all the buzz surrounding Billy Bob Thornton's Oscar nomination later that year (one of two received by the film, the only one in the acting categories) I checked it out when it became available on DVD. If curiosity about Thornton's impressive physical transformation is what initially drew me to A Simple Plan, it ultimately became the least significant aspect of the film.
Almost instantly I responded to the dramatic potential of the setting, characters, and situation, engrossed by the unexpected intimacy achieved in approaching a heist/crime film as though it were a character drama. Raimi builds suspense like a master, overlaying the story with telling small-town details and a well-sustained tone of enveloping dread and tragedy. Even the bleak, wintry landscape seems less the work of Mother Nature than an ill-effects response to the numbing effects of greed.

Indeed, the weather is practically another character in A Simple Plan. I credit Raimi with giving his film a look representative of what its nearing-middle-age characters’ lives must feel like: constrained, hemmed-in, and as anchored as the figures in a snow globe. As Sarah brutally lays out in a scene of clear-eyed fatalism, when it comes to what possibilities life holds for these average, unexceptional people, the die is pretty much cast. Many scenes begin with shots of vast, icy stillness or crow-eye views of limitless banks of snow and nothingness.
Even at the very start of the film, when the streets are adorned with Christmas decorations and Hank walks with a lightness we’ll never see in him again, at no time is the snow made to appear picturesque or poetic. From the frosted windows, slate-gray skies, and characters swathed in layers and layers of insulated clothing (even indoors); the weather is presented as just another hardship. A severe, isolating, suffocating obstacle to an easier life. 

Gary Cole as Neil Baxter

PERFORMANCES

A Simple Plan's Oscar-nominated screenplay is by first-time screenwriter Scott B. Smith, adapted from his own 1993 novel. Paring down the story to the bare bones of its suspense-thriller structure, Smith's economic screenplay combines a strong eye for the shortcuts of visual storytelling with an ear for the kind of character-establishing dialogue one associates with a stage play. The tension-filled narrative flows easily from plot twist to plot twist, never once feeling contrived or labored. Best of all, he manages to accomplish all this while keeping the film’s central focus on the disintegrating relationships between the characters, and the telling ways they respond to having their theoretical (superficial?) principles tested by a genuine moral dilemma.

Without the benefit of much in the way of backstory, Smith’s characters, whether in moments of monstrous callousness or pitiable despair, are granted a level of humanity lacking in the novel. A grace attributable to the authenticity and depth of emotion the cast brings to their characters.

Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton (who appeared together in 1992’s One False Move) share a symbiotic anti-chemistry as the brothers with nothing in common “…except maybe our last name.” The late Bill Paxton, whose settled-in boyishness lends his Hank the look of a self-disappointed fair-haired child, is all agitated exasperation and impatience in his scenes with Thornton. College-educated and preppy-fastidious next to the town’s hayseed casual, one senses Hank enjoys feeling like the civilized big fish in a little pond. Paxton taps into the seeds of disenchantment that lay just below the surface of Hank's easygoing affability. Paxton is terrific and it's easy to see why he was so often cast as likable characters. He radiated an easy openness and accessibility masking layers of complexity.

Sarah Discovers the Source of the Money 

Personal fave Bridget Fonda (Single White Female), exuding almost Shakespearean levels of steely dominance, proves to be as much of a surprise and dramatic force-to-be-reckoned-with as Thornton. From the moment her character is introduced we’re made aware of how smart she is, but as the promise of “what can be” comes to poison her tolerance for “what is,” she morphs into something of a domestic underworld mastermind. It's great fun (and plenty scary, too) to witness her transformation from bubbly bride to hardened housewife... like Carroll Baker running that all-lady hit squad out of her kitchen in Andy Warhol’s BAD.

Brent Briscoe as the oafish Lou is a Master Class lesson in how to humanize an unintelligent character lacking in self-awareness. He even achieves the impossible by playing a drunk scene convincingly. Pouring a life's worth of resentment into the way he unfailingly refers to Hank as “Mr. Accountant,” Briscoe's pivotal drunk scene calls for whiplash emotional shifts from jocularity, betrayal, heartsickness, desperation, and ultimately, rage. Briscoe plays it in a manner that takes us with him on this rollercoaster, letting us see where these emotions come from. 

Billy Bob Thornton pulls off something similar, but on a much more heroic scale, with his brilliant turn as Jacob. True, it’s become an Oscar-bait cliché for an actor to deglamorize, adopt intellectual disabilities, or lose themselves under pounds of prosthetics; but Thornton's external transformation is no acting stunt. The change in his outward appearance is largely the result of what he's doing on the inside; Thornton inhabits his character.
In showing us the man behind the loser’s countenance, Thornton sidesteps the easy pathos, revealing Jacob to be one of the least self-deluded characters in the film, one wholly lacking in self-pity. One of A Simple Plan’s many twists is the upending of the expectation that the relationship of these polar-opposites brothers might bear a trace of a George and Lennie Of Mice and Men dynamic. Far from it. In a particularly uncomfortable scene (exceptionally well-played by Paxton), the casually supercilious Hank learns that the misfit Jacob not only mocks him behind his back, but regards him with a level of disdain that borders on contempt.

THE STUFF OF FANTASY

I think one of the major reasons I love movies about “plans gone awry” is because I’m a control freak and lifelong non-joiner who goes out of his way to avoid groups, teams, and collaborations of any kind. These movies confirm my worst fears. My favorites: Silent Partner (1978), Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead, (2007), What Became of Jack and Jill? (1972), Jackie Brown (1997), The Killing (1956), Fargo (1996), and Séance on a Wet Afternoon (1964)—all involve meticulously arranged plans going horribly awry due to the human factor. The factor of error that comes from disparate characters pursuing the same goal, but for wildly different reasons.

"Did you tell him about the plane?"

A major thrill to be had in watching A Simple Plan is getting caught up in the yo-yo pull of being initially drawn to one character, only to be confronted with something unsavory in them, then suddenly having your sympathies shifted elsewhere. The trick of making the viewer complicit in a crime is nothing new (Hitchcock’s Psycho), but the quality of performances in A Simple Plan raises the emotional stakes and ups the tension ante. By the time the film arrived at its crushing conclusion, I was fairly wrung out from the suspense.

THE STUFF OF DREAMS

The first words spoken in A Simple Plan belong to Hank, recounting in voiceover something his late father (a simple farmer who lost his land to debt) once said to him about what it takes for a man to be happy: “A wife he loves, a decent job, friends and neighbors who like and respect him.” Hank, in carving out a life for himself substantially more stable than that of his parents, has attained all of these. Hank and Sarah both work at jobs neither finds particularly fulfilling: she at a library, he as an accountant at the local feed mill; but with a nice home, the respect of the community, and a baby on the way, they have realized a humble their version of the American Dream.

But built into the American Dream is a paradox: a reverence for achievement, ambition, and accumulation that’s at fundamental cross-purposes with being content with what one has. As a culture, we don't seem to respect people who are happy in their lot…we call them slackers and underachievers. Yet for people who devote their time and efforts to amassing and hoarding obscene levels of wealth, we've only terms of admiration.

A Simple Plan reveals that Hank, like many people in this country, has adopted the belief that having more is always preferable to having enough. He can’t conceive of happiness as a place in the present, only an idealized destination point on the horizon of some nebulous “future.”

This thematic subtext underscores everything that happens in A Simple Plan, asking us to examine the moral distinction...if there exists one...between need and want. Happiness is always held up as the ultimate goal behind all the greed and hunger for acquisition our society seems to worship. We keep telling people to dream big and set their sights high, to meet goals and then set bigger ones when those are achieved. But does there ever come a time when chasing after the next big thing is too high a price to pay for happiness? 

As each news cycle brings with it increasingly disheartening evidence of America’s rapidly disintegrating moral compass; as absurd and corrupt “leaders” normalize justification and deception while distorting the values of truth and honesty in the interest of money and power; I’m afraid A Simple Plan already reveals itself to be a bit of a timepiece in suggesting that the loss of one’s humanity is a loss of considerable significance.

BONUS MATERIAL

Mr. Schmitt, a disgruntled customer accusing Hank of faulty bookkeeping, was played by actor and producer John Paxton, the 77-year-old father of Bill Paxton. John Paxton died in 2011.



Copyright © Ken Anderson   2009 - 2019