A SIMPLE PLAN
A film review by Steve Rhodes
Copyright 1998 Steve Rhodes
RATING (0 TO ****): ***
"It's gonna work," Hank tells his co-conspirators in a scene late in A
SIMPLE PLAN. "It's gonna work. It's perfect."
The problem is that this plan is just the latest in a long line of
simple plans, each designed to cover up the botched implementation of
the last, that have led these once honest people into a hell on earth.
Scott B. Smith's script for A SIMPLE PLAN, based on his best selling
novel, is a carefully crafted character study with challenging moral
dilemmas.
As the story opens, Hank, his brother Jacob, and Jacob's friend Lou
discover a small plane buried in the snow. Inside it is a bag full of
over four million dollars, which they figure must be drug money.
Hank, played by Bill Paxton from TWISTER, is the group's brain and
conscience. A college-educated man in a backwoods town, he reluctantly
agrees with Jacob and Lou's plan to keep the money, but only until they
can figure out if it's safe or not. Hank insists that he be the one to
hide it and keeps threatening to burn it if anything goes wrong. He has
a very pregnant wife and a middle-class lifestyle that he doesn't want
to jeopardize.
Bridget Fonda plays Hank's wife, Sarah. Starting off with the most
scruples, Sarah loses them the fastest. She is soon directing her
husband, the nominal head of their little group of naive criminals, in
one illegal venture after another.
With a large set of bad teeth and dirty, stringy hair, SLING BLADE's
Billy Bob Thornton plays Jacob as a sympathetic character, a country
bumpkin whose brain is a couple of beers shy of a six-pack. Jacob has
an uncanny ability to turn their simple plans for success into complex
disasters. He is a middle-age man whose only "girlfriend" came from a
dare back in high school. One girl earned $100 from her friends by
agreeing to go steady with Jacob for a month. He even got to hold her
hand once, but he's never kissed her or any other female.
Jacob's buddy Lou (Brent Briscoe) is his mental equal. The unemployed,
and perhaps unemployable, Lou's claim to fame is that, at 40 years old,
he's known as the town drunk.
Concealing their ill-gotten gains proves much trickier than they ever
imagined. When they aren't causing their own difficulties, external
circumstances conspire to throw obstacles in their way.
The press notes appropriately invoke the name of Hitchcock. Hitchcock
would have naturally been drawn to this tale of average people caught up
in a web from which they seem incapable of extricating themselves.
Director Sam Raimi and production designer Patrizia von Brandenstein
purposely created a bleak set with a black-and-white color scheme. They
saw the story as having the stark simplicity of a poem, and they wanted
the viewer's attention focused on the characters.
Among the world's worst criminals, only a little luck and a never-ending
series of schemes keeps them going. Along the way, however, greed
causes them to start turning on each other. The director, never missing
a beat, keeps the audience guessing the story's resolution until almost
the last minute.
A SIMPLE PLAN runs 2:01. It is rated R for violence and profanity and
would be fine for teenagers.
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Have I Seen This Movie: Yes
And What Did I Think?: Sam Raimi does a great job directing this movie about 3 backwoods men who find $4 million dollars in a crashed plane in the woods. thet decide they will hang on to the money until Spring, then if nobody claims it, they will split it and move out of town. From there, things just go bust. Fear and greed turn the men on themselves and on others as they fight to keep their secret safe. Bill Paxton does a nice job at playing the more level headed lead character, and as usual Billy Bob Thornton has a standout performance as his brother. Bridget Fonda plays Paxton's wife who refuses to let her husband give up the money. At first he was going to turn it into the police but was pursuaded to keep it by the other 2 men. He asks his wife what she would do if she found that much money and she says she would turn it in. That changes when it actually became a reality to her, and it makes you wonder what most people would do if it happened. We may say we might turn it in, but unless we were actually confronted with the situation, who knows. This movie also shows you what money can do to people, as Paxton is unwillingly led to murder several people, including his own brother at the end, since his brother asks him to shoot him. In the end it was all for nothing anyway, since the bills were marked and couldn't be spent. A Simple Plan is one of the best movies of 1998, and draws you into its story and characters. You will really feel for them and be amazed at how complicated a simple plan to split money can get.
I give A Simple Plan 4.5 out of 5 stars
Review written July 2, 1999
