'Simple plan' sets web of irony

Courtesy of Paramount Pictures Billy Bob Thornton, Bill Paxton, and Brent Briscoe contemplate their find in 'A Simple Plan."

By Bryan Lark
Daily Arts Writer

When director Sam Raimi, a Detroit-area native and Michigan State alumnus best known for the tongue-in-cheek morbidity of the "Evil Dead" series and "Darkman," makes a film called "A Simple Plan," at least a hint of irony can be expected.

Indeed, irony involved is that the film is far from simple and nothing goes as planned for the characters. But perhaps more surprising is the brilliant fashion in which Raimi avoids the outlandish, though ingenious, trickery that has marked his previous films.

"A Simple Plan" is a rivetingly snowy tale of money lost and moral dilemmas found that Raimi injects with a sort of bleak charisma and a compelling symbolic order that make the script's many fulfilling plot twists all the more thrilling.

"Simple" follows one complex winter in the lives of the Mitchells - Hank (Bill Paxton), his pregnant wife Sarah (Bridget Fonda) and his outcast brother Jacob (Billy Bob Thornton).

The complexities begin when Hank, Jacob and Jacob's equal in loserdom Lou (Brent Briscoe) stumble upon a downed plane, conveniently stuffed with a bag of cash. The three presume it is drug money from a transfer gone awry.

If it's drug money, they reason, then it's not stealing and Jacob and Lou reluctantly agree to Hank's plan of saving the money until the snow melts, to see if anyone's after them or the cash, then spending it in the spring.

That is, if they make it through the winter with those million. This leads Hank, Jacob, Lou and Sarah, whose initial aversion to the money is matched by her later green-driven ambition, into temptation, greed and a world of criminal behavior they never knew they had in them.

The result is a twisted and shocking mystery/tragedy of almost biblical proportions replete with actors at the top of their form and a director experiencing a stylistic renaissance that should garner him newfound respect and clemency for creating the Sharon Stone-Leonardo DiCaprio western "The Quick & the Dead."

Paxton has never been better cast than as the everyman knee-deep in extreme circumstances, and Fonda finally finds a fully matured role that doesn't cast her a pot-smoking or pistol-packing cutie. Both turn in the best performances of their career.

Thornton, however, doesn't just give the performance of his career, he gives one of the best performances of the year, as the slow-witted Jacob who's torn between his strained familial bond with Hank and Sarah and his beer-busting loyalty to Lou.

The performances are only enhanced by the forboding atmosphere orchestrated by Raimi, chock-full of loaded images of crows and foxes, plus oppositions between snow-covered landscapes and lingering close-ups that catch the characters at the their most calculating and vulnerable.

Also calculated is Raimi's shrewd use of Danny Elfman's creepily evocative score and Scott B. Smith's savvy, bare-necessities adaptation of his already blistering 1993 suspense novel, filled not with heroic gestures but with human frailty.

But the true hero of this wonderfully grim and invigorating tall tale, if there are any at all, is Raimi himself and he just may find himself, along with the incomparable Billy Bob, anointed with an Oscar nomination for his splendidly realized troubles.

That is, if everything goes as planned. But like free money stirred into an already tumultuous gene pool, Oscar prediction is never simple.

On the other hand, two hours of swift, shocking entertainment is "Simple," indeed.

01-22-99