A Simple Plan
"A Simple Plan" Directed by Sam Raimi; written by Scott B. Smith, MPAA: Rating [R] for violence and language. Run time 2 hours. With Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton, Brent Briscoe and Bridget Fonda.
Finally. I've been complaining for the last twenty years about too many movies having gratuitously happy endings. This one doesn't, kids. If you go to the movies to see Mary Poppins or 101 puppies, sit this one out. People are going to die here, and after all is said, the best laid plans not only aft gang agley, they just flat go up in smoke. You will not leave the theater whistling.
"A Simple Plan" is another bleak Minnesota in Winter suspense film; Fargo without the Prairie Home Companion comedic relief. A morality play of the first order, it's a movie that asks the question: "If the love of money is the root of all evil, could it also be the cause of all stupidity?"
The setup:
Hank Mitchell (Bill Paxton) works an ordinary job in a small-town grain elevator and feed store. He loves his soon to deliver pregnant wife (Bridget Fonda), and lives a simple, if unexamined life in bucolic Delano, Minnesota. His older brother Jacob (Billy Bob Thornton) is a down and out, perenially unemployed drunken layabout whose best friend Lou (Brent Briscoe) is equally shiftless - and maybe a bit less intelligent. On a cold, dismal white-out sort of Winter day (get used to it, the sun never shines in Delano), the brothers and Lou set out to decorate the family gravesite, an annual event. On the way back, the beer-swilling bubbas manage to wrinkle Jacob's truck around a tree, and Lou's dog, Mary Beth (Mary Beth) leads them off into the woods in pursuit of a chicken coop-raiding fox that caused their vehicular mishap in the first place. Still with me? The boys traipse off into the woods, and as Hank defends his straight-arrow college educated existence, Lou's errant snowball unearths (?) the carcass of a crashed airplane. After a raven-induced
Tippi Hedren moment in the cockpit, Hank emerges with the axis around which the whole play revolves - a duffel with 4.4 million dollars in $100 bills.
The complication:
The boys salivate over the money for a while and eventually decide to go home and secretly wait it out and see if anyone comes looking for the cash. Unfortunately, none of the boys are too bright, are totally unable
to keep their mouths shut, and the lure of unimaginable wealth hanging on a few quickly raveling threads of honor among theives drives these characters and takes a tremendous toll on their collective and individual abilities to discriminate between right and wrong. Things go from bad to horrific.
The best part of this movie for me was the recurring feeling that [a. you've seen guys like this driving down I-70; or [b, you may actually KNOW people like this. More importantly for the sake of the film, you find yourself constantly questioning your own moral judgement and projecting yourself into the character's predicament. What would YOU do if YOU found 4.4 million dollars? (Let me help you here - that's 88 years income at 50 large a year - and that's if you bury it in the back yard) Then, what would you do in every other increasingly convoluted situation these characters create for themselves?
The payoff:
Oh no you don't!
You'll have to watch this for yourselves. This is not a perky date movie children, it's dark - and with the exception of a few minor tech glitches (wandering color temperature and a slightly myopic focus puller) it's well crafted and will suck you right in. Bill Paxton transcends his doofy "Twister" style and is well cast as a whitebread Country Joe SixPack. Bridget Fonda begins this movie as a sqeaky-clean mother-to-be housewife, but by the time push comes to shove, she shows herself to be every bit as dark, devious and grasping as any of the boys. Billy Bob Thornton is well, Billy Bob Thornton - the perfect blank canvas for a director and screenwriter to paint on. His portrayal of a dim, hopeless soul is captivating and could focus almost any movie (as long as Adam Sandler wasn't part of it.)
A tense, sometimes graphically violent two hours, but worth the price. I gave "A Simple Plan" three cows. Go see it.
Finally. I've been complaining for the last twenty years about too many movies having gratuitously happy endings. This one doesn't, kids. If you go to the movies to see Mary Poppins or 101 puppies, sit this one out. People are going to die here, and after all is said, the best laid plans not only aft gang agley, they just flat go up in smoke. You will not leave the theater whistling.
"A Simple Plan" is another bleak Minnesota in Winter suspense film; Fargo without the Prairie Home Companion comedic relief. A morality play of the first order, it's a movie that asks the question: "If the love of money is the root of all evil, could it also be the cause of all stupidity?"
The setup:
Hank Mitchell (Bill Paxton) works an ordinary job in a small-town grain elevator and feed store. He loves his soon to deliver pregnant wife (Bridget Fonda), and lives a simple, if unexamined life in bucolic Delano, Minnesota. His older brother Jacob (Billy Bob Thornton) is a down and out, perenially unemployed drunken layabout whose best friend Lou (Brent Briscoe) is equally shiftless - and maybe a bit less intelligent. On a cold, dismal white-out sort of Winter day (get used to it, the sun never shines in Delano), the brothers and Lou set out to decorate the family gravesite, an annual event. On the way back, the beer-swilling bubbas manage to wrinkle Jacob's truck around a tree, and Lou's dog, Mary Beth (Mary Beth) leads them off into the woods in pursuit of a chicken coop-raiding fox that caused their vehicular mishap in the first place. Still with me? The boys traipse off into the woods, and as Hank defends his straight-arrow college educated existence, Lou's errant snowball unearths (?) the carcass of a crashed airplane. After a raven-induced
Tippi Hedren moment in the cockpit, Hank emerges with the axis around which the whole play revolves - a duffel with 4.4 million dollars in $100 bills.
The complication:
The boys salivate over the money for a while and eventually decide to go home and secretly wait it out and see if anyone comes looking for the cash. Unfortunately, none of the boys are too bright, are totally unable
to keep their mouths shut, and the lure of unimaginable wealth hanging on a few quickly raveling threads of honor among theives drives these characters and takes a tremendous toll on their collective and individual abilities to discriminate between right and wrong. Things go from bad to horrific.
The best part of this movie for me was the recurring feeling that [a. you've seen guys like this driving down I-70; or [b, you may actually KNOW people like this. More importantly for the sake of the film, you find yourself constantly questioning your own moral judgement and projecting yourself into the character's predicament. What would YOU do if YOU found 4.4 million dollars? (Let me help you here - that's 88 years income at 50 large a year - and that's if you bury it in the back yard) Then, what would you do in every other increasingly convoluted situation these characters create for themselves?
The payoff:
Oh no you don't!
You'll have to watch this for yourselves. This is not a perky date movie children, it's dark - and with the exception of a few minor tech glitches (wandering color temperature and a slightly myopic focus puller) it's well crafted and will suck you right in. Bill Paxton transcends his doofy "Twister" style and is well cast as a whitebread Country Joe SixPack. Bridget Fonda begins this movie as a sqeaky-clean mother-to-be housewife, but by the time push comes to shove, she shows herself to be every bit as dark, devious and grasping as any of the boys. Billy Bob Thornton is well, Billy Bob Thornton - the perfect blank canvas for a director and screenwriter to paint on. His portrayal of a dim, hopeless soul is captivating and could focus almost any movie (as long as Adam Sandler wasn't part of it.)
A tense, sometimes graphically violent two hours, but worth the price. I gave "A Simple Plan" three cows. Go see it.