A Simple Plan (1998, R)

Directed by Sam Ramni

Starring Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thorton, Bridget Fonda

Written by Scott B. Smith (Based on his novel)

As Reviewed by James Brundage

Well, it’s about time. Everyone has been bugging me, nagging me, telling me to see A Simple Plan, and, for weeks on end, I haven’t. In fact, it has been so long since it first came out that I was about to give up and watch it when it comes to video. But, out of the blue, it comes to a relatively close theatre and I decided to spend a night going to it. Boy, am I glad that I did!

A Simple Plan is, obviously, a film about a simple plan to evenly divide 4.4 million in dirty money among three country folk who stumble upon it in a plane wreckage. But, as the tension of sitting on the money until the plane is found by others and they know the coast is clear, the relationship between them disintegrates into a complete paranoia.

I think I can praise this film best by comparing it to others. Taking it’s cue from Fargo, A Simple Plan makes use of a snowy Minnesota landscape to portray bleakness, both moral, physical, and emotional. Taking off of The Dark Half, it uses crows to provide a subconscious menace to the viewer. Also, taking off of Very Bad Things, it uses a complete absence of morals to accentuate their importance.

This is not to say that this film is a patchwork effort. It is a full-fledged original work, taking on the age old theme of easy money and its difficult consequences, and, like Ramni’s The Quick and the Dead, radically challenging its limits and potentials. It transforms the genre of murder mystery into a morality play. It takes something completely simple, and shows how the simple plan all too quickly becomes devastatingly complex.

The film opens and closes lyrically, both with shots of winter and Bridget Fonda putting books away at her job. It then quickly switches to some of the finest single shots of the year (second only to the imagery of a dying bird in The Thin Red Line) of a fox in a henhouse, as the idiom goes.

This kind of symbolism runs rampant in the film, but does it in such a fashion as to not detract from the sublime tension of the mystery set in front of us.

The simple plan, hold the money until the plane is found, goes terribly wrong. Before you know it, murders are being covered up, alliances are being made, sides are being taken. The three friends are quickly divided and changed into enemies.

My pick for Best Supporting Actor goes with Billy Bob Thorton, who delivers the performance of his career as Jacob, saddened younger brother of Paxton’s character. He has no job, he has no wife, he has no life. The most heart-wrenching moments of the film come as Jacob wrestles with his own concepts of morals and deals with what he has done: played part in three murders, one of whom is a close friend.

I stated earlier that, like Very Bad Things, A Simple Plan uses an absence of morals to illustrate their importance. This is not quite correct. There is a definitive dearth in morals of Paxton’s character up until the end (and what a shocking ending it is!), but morals themselves are clearly the major item generating tension: not the money. Greed, however, is the driving factor of Bridget Fonda, who plays what at first comes off as a devout housewife of Paxton, only to reveal a greedy, self-absorbed woman when the beauty is peeled away like the skin of an orange.

Yet again, as has happened about ten times this year, I am faced with a film I am able to write a paper on but limited to writing a review. I can only urge you to see it for yourself, and enjoy.