Simple Plan, A (1998)

reviewed by
Cheng-Jih Chen


Looking it up on the IMDB, I think the only Sam Raimi movies I've seen are "Darkman", "Army of Darkness", and the Sharon Stone western, "The Quick and the Dead." Except for "Army", I've missed the Evil Dead movies that first put him on the map. The strongest impression of Raimi, though, comes more from "Hercules" and "Xena", if only because Ted Raimi and Bruce Campbell are regulars. Much clever goofiness in these shows.

I finally got around to seeing Raimi's "A Simple Plan" this weekend, and you can't easily travel further in tone from "Xena" or "Army of Darkness." Here we have a moral fable, where reasonable decisions made by decent folk lead down a path where decency is thrown out for the sake of fear and greed, and where small, innocent choices spiral out of control. While good luck may be the reside of good design, the film plays out a converse, with a simple plan contorting into disaster in the face of accident and unforeseen consequences.

The basic plot is the story of a trio of friends who stumble on a lot of money. They decide to keep the windfall from themselves, even though the circumstances look suspicious. They have to hide it, for a while at least, or questions will be asked. We've seen this before, but Raimi and his actors handle these familiar parts very well.

A recent, similar film is the British "Shallow Grave", where three flatmates fall into a bundle of cash when their new boarder dies. Not a bad film, it is more a cautionary tale about the effective disposal of unwanted corpses and why people may want hacksaws in the big city: it's a body dumping black comedy. While there's the familiar flavor of desperate greed and paranoia in the film, the main difference is that the people from "Shallow Grave" are all heartless urban assholes (clearly shown in the first 5 minutes) whose ultimate fates you don't particularly care about, while "A Simple Plan" features rural workers scraping by meagerly, carrying believeable hopes and memories. Skin-deep yuppies living in the present, whose windfall only increases the degree of skin-deep yuppism, or ordinary folk with histories and futures, for whom the cash is a desperately transforming experience: which makes for the more better story?

I don't want to talk too much about the plot, mainly because there's a certain pleasure in seeing it unfold, seeing how the innocuous choices lead to treacherous ground, which leads to even worse choices. Instead, I'll reassure you that the early animal metaphors, which seem overly heavy and obvious, really do figure in the plot later. They don't exist in a vacuum, even if the whole fox in the henhouse thing really is a laying it on a bit thick. It's a fine film.


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