Too Simple a Plan
A Simple Plan
directed by Sam Raimi
starring Billy Bob Thornton, Bill Paxton, Bridget Fonda
A Simple Plan has director Sam Raimi trying to change his spots, stepping
away from the cartoon violence of his previous films, which include the Evil Dead
series, Darkman, and the execrable western/Sharon Stone vehicle The Quick
and the Dead.
It's a "keep the treasure secret" type of film, and this appealing theme
goes way back in the movies: friends stumble upon something valuable, they make a
pact to keep the treasure safe, and soon plans go awry as the protagonists are consumed
by greed and paranoia. Think of Bogie slowly losing his marbles in The Treasure
of the Sierra Madre, or the scheming roommates burying the evidence in Danny
Boyle's more recent A Shallow Grave.
A Simple Plan begins on the afternoon of New Year's
Eve in a northern U.S. town. Hank Mitchell (Bill Paxton), his older brother Jacob
(Billy Bob Thornton) and Jacob's buddy Lou (Brent Briscoe) are tooling along a country
road in their pickup when they discover the snow-covered wreck of a small plane.
Thornton and Paxton last appeared together in Carl Franklin's outstanding indie film
(which Thornton wrote) One False Move, and they have an easy familiarity on
screen; you're on their side from the outside. Inside the plane they find a dead
pilot and a bag with four and a half million dollars in cash. They figure the deal
for an downed drug plane or robbery getaway gone sour.
Lou's a fat pig drunk with a harpy wife; he's riddled with debt, addictions, and
lots of unfocused hostility. Jacob's his simple-minded accomplice; he likes hanging
out with someone who doesn't make too much fun of him. Hank is Honest and Upright.
He's married, with a job at the feed store and a baby on the way.
Lou desperately wants to keep the money, and Jacob figures why not, while Hank needs
coaxing before going along, finally agreeing on the condition he gets to safeguard
the find - if the law gets suspicious, he torches the money and they all walk away.
Hank's wife Sarah (Bridget Fonda) appears as a very pregnant, sweet and simple small-town
girl. She believes the cash should be turned in, but after seeing the stacks of money
dumped on the kitchen table she abruptly changes her mind, thinking instead about
the best way to keep the found loot a secret. She tells Hank to return part of the
money to the plane to make the site appear undiscovered, then to sit on the rest
of the dough until police find the plane in the spring and wrap up the case.
Of course, that alone wouldn't be any fun for the viewer; something has to go wrong.
While returning to the plane, Hank and Jacob attract the attention of a local townsman
who passes by, and Jacob panics, thinking their dream of riches is about to be lost.
Bound together now by a crime as well as by money, the schemers are quickly overcome
by their obsession for secrecy.
Raimi has worked best in the past by using very stylish camera work with stock characters
and sharp editing to propel the action. He'd swing the lens around as if it were
on a rope, jerking the eye toward some new horror. He'd zoom in from a two-shot to
an extreme close-up, and stick your face into the goo. Plots were always mere sketches
- the bare framework he needed on which to hang effects, cool shots, and dark humour.
That's been the virtue and the problem with Raimi's work all
along, though: plot, characters, acting - these have always been secondary.They never
made a speck of sense, but the premise of his movies grabbed you, and one's expectations
beyond a few thrills were nonexistent. With his latest movie, Raimi shows his ambition
to tackle bigger themes than mutants and super heroes - and he has some great ideas
in setting up the frame. The nifty sequence connecting shots of a fox raiding a henhouse,
the critter's near collision with Lou's pickup truck, and the discovery of the plane
shows a dreamy sense of inevitable fate: the boys are being drawn to their doom,
drawn into hell, and their environment is a witness. Crows flock around the wrecked
plane, and crowd the trees around it. Lou, Hank, and Jacob pass under a mantle of
silently staring crows as they approach the plane. Omens are laid on thick, here,
but this doesn't diminish the effect.
But like the guys with the loot, Raimi has dropped into unfamiliar
territory. Pacing, character development, motivation, coherence: at present all these
seem beyond his abilities. Simple messages of desire and greed, of the danger of
getting what you want, belies the difficulty in controlling the elements that make
up suspense. Like a well-told story or a neatly flung arrow, the best practitioners
make it look easy. The shifting of loyalties, the rationalizing of the characters,
the changes in personality: all these hinge on the most skillful revealing and unraveling
of the story, the playing out of believable scenes.
But for Raimi, props and clichés stand in for acting and development. Jacob
is a simpleton, so show him with tape on his glasses. Lou's a red-necked moron: give
him a shotgun and lots of cans of beer. The actors are hamstrung by the sketchily
drawn characters and ponderous dialogue. The movie comes to a dead stop at one point
so Jacob can query his brother ". . .did you ever feel. . . evil?"
The actors move through their changes ultra-rapidly, going from giddy excitement
at discovering the money to homicidal blood-lust before the viewer can say "wait
a minute!" Their characters descend so swiftly to the abyss that they become
unbelievable, then comical, and finally - uninteresting.
The wintry location (cf the snow and the guns) has drawn comparisons to the Coen
brothers' Fargo. But an ocean of good writing and acting separate the two
films. Everything on screen in A Simple Plan is drained of energy and vitality;
even the actors walk about as if struggling for air in the thin atmosphere of Raimi's
direction. Or perhaps it's simply that, for Raimi, the walking dead are more comfortable
subjects.
- Neil Brouillet