 |
BY BRIAN LIBBY |
|
A Simple Plan Rated R Now playing Billy Bob Thornton, Bridget Fonda and Bill Paxton find more than money in A Simple Plan.REVIEW"Hank, do you ever feel evil?" This question forms the core of A Simple Plan, a new film that explores the ease with which even good people can commit horrifying acts. Bill Paxton (Twister) and Billy Bob Thornton (Sling Blade) star as Hank and Jacob Mitchell, brothers toiling through daily life in snow-covered rural America. While searching for their dog in a secluded forest, they and friend Lou (Brent Briscoe) stumble upon the crash site of a small plane. Searching the wreckage for survivors, they find a duffel bag stuffed with hundred-dollar bills. Do you turn the money in or do you keep it? Here the moral dilemma of whether or not to keep the money is resolved in seconds. They will take the money, sit on it for a year and see if anyone claims it. Like the foolhardy prospectors of John Huston's Treasure of the Sierra Madre, these men quickly mistake their justification of a "finders keepers" mentality for an act of restrained common sense. Before we can condemn them, however, a bumper crop of motivation takes root. Jacob and Lou are perennially unemployed, and Hank is about to become a father. Moreover, the memory of Hank and Jacob's father casts a long shadow. Standing in the now-abandoned family farmhouse, Jacob laments the inheritance that would have been his had their father not drowned in a sea of debt. Jacob speculates that their father's fatal auto accident may have been a suicide designed to deliver in insurance money what he could not in life. This adds to the guilt Hank already feels about the role his college education played in the family's financial meltdown. Turn in the $4.4 million? No way. The money can right the wrongs of the past with plenty left over for a new pickup. A Simple Plan's journey to theaters--like the fate of its characters--has proven vastly more tumultuous than anyone originally expected. Adapted from a popular novel by Scott B. Smith, this project has been on the burner for a while. Sam Raimi, director of the Evil Dead trilogy and The Quick and the Dead, was picked to direct after more than a few others were slated. Raimi is widely known for his acrobatic visual style and violent, comic book-like physicality. He has worked with the Coen brothers (co-writing The Hudsucker Proxy), a duo who showed with Fargo that they know how to construct a good film about greed, blood and snow. For the screen adaptation of Smith's novel, Raimi changed the location from Ohio to Minnesota, perhaps trying to draw more connection with the Coens' hugely successful film. With the movie's $17 million budget and short (55-day) shooting schedule, Raimi's celebrated visual style is more restrained than usual. Regardless of style, Raimi's most important responsibility with A Simple Plan is to characterize the film's protagonists as ordinary people who always expected to walk down a righteous, law-abiding path. Because we all know the carefully laid plans of Hank, Jacob and Lou will unravel into chaos and anarchy, the shock value must come not from violence but from the notion that these people succumb to it. Raimi is indeed able to walk that fine line between surprise and believability. The strength of the film comes from the performances of its lead actors. As Hank, Paxton's patented bland-but-familiar everyman is right for this story. Bridget Fonda (as Sarah Mitchell) goes against the benign wife/mother stereotype by emerging as the most conniving of the bunch. And no one in Hollywood has shown a greater talent for portraying the dimwit hick with quiet dignity than Thornton. There is nothing extraordinary about A Simple Plan. This story of a perfect scheme unraveling lacks the humor and complexity of its recent predecessors (Reservoir Dogs, Fargo). Raimi never lets you laugh at the absurdity of it all, and without that crucial self-awareness A Simple Plan seems to drag.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
|
