Review: A Simple Plan
Starring: Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thorton, Bridget Fonda
Directed by Sam Raimi
Approx 120 min
I know what I would do with $4.4 million if I found it in a previously undiscovered airplane crash site, especially if I were with Jacob and Lou. (Huh?) Well, in any event, that is the situation Hank (Paxton) finds himself in. He and his dim-witted brother Jacob (Thorton) and tubby friend Lou (Brent Briscoe) come upon a large bag of cash inside a plane wreck. Against his better judgement, Hank decides to go along with the idea of keeping it rather than going to the authorities. The rest of the film is a question of who is going to die to keep this a secret, and is it worth it? A Simple Wish lies along the lines of Very Bad Things, Clay Pigeons and even Fargo, and is kind of wrapped all into one little dark bundle. Oh, and its much better than any of those.
Sam Raimi took a departure from his normal freak-show horror-monkey films and made this stylish and intriguing picture. He really lets the audience sit back and watch the events unfold rather than force them down our throats as many directors prefer to do. I think Raimi knew he had a winner on his hands and decided to direct the picture on a natural flowing course.
One of the film's components can be linked to a recurring theme in Terrence Malick's The Thin Red Line. In Malick's three hour bore-a-thon, he makes an interesting attempt to link Mother Earth to his war story. It seemed nothing more than an occasional pretty cut to a field of flowing grass, a small bird, or a flowing body of water. Sure, there were obvious metaphorical connections, but there was no subtlty to his efforts. Raimi does a fine job of tying in a fox in a chicken coop and birds of prey to signify the future of the characters. I think most viewers may miss the comparison, but it is a very intriguing ingredient in the film.
And then there's Billy Bob Thorton, who is proof that the independent film industry is vital to the life blood of Hollywood. If it can continute to produce people like Thorton, Hollywood will be ok. He gives a fantastic and devastatingly deep performance here. It is not as engrossing as his Carl Childers character in Slingblade, but is is just as complex, if not more so. Jacob is slow and simple, and yet we so often see him deep in thought. I wondered if he was thinking about things that he would never say (or didn't know HOW to say) or if he was just taking a long time to think about the thing he just said. Here he really proves his worth as one of the best character actors in the industry.
Though the plot is somewhat unoriginal, it has a very appealing new twist in its characters. Paxton gives one of the better performances of his career as the straight and serious leader of the group (a far cry from Chet in Wierd Science). Perhaps Bridget Fonda is miscast as his advice-giving wife, but she certainly doesn't do anything ruin the picture. A Simple Plan can be included in the group of recent small Hollywood films that is just dark and pretty un-redeeming. But at least this one has an important message, unlike so many of its counterparts.
* * * 1/2 out of * * * * stars ©1999 Nick Amado namado@concentric.net check out my movie reviews at www.writerboy.com/nick (or I'll come to your house and read all my reviews outloud in Miss Piggy's voice)
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