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| Images courtesy of Arrow Video |
Author and screenwriter Scott B. Smith’s 1993 neo-noir crime
novel A Simple Plan, the story of two brothers and a friend who discover
a crashed plane housing millions in cash and the lengths to which they go to
keep it secret including but not limited to murder, first began well before the
book was finished being published. Initially
with The Graduate director Mike Nichols attached before leaving and
letting the film languish in development hell with Ben Stiller and John Dahl
passing on the project, the film moved to Paramount Pictures where Deliverance
director John Boorman was hired.
However due to last minute scheduling conflicts, the Midwestern-gothic
infused crime noir landed in The Evil Dead creator Sam Raimi’s
hands. Made after his western actioner The
Quick and the Dead, the 1998 multiple Academy Award nominated A Simple
Plan now available in 4K UHD via Arrow Video in a new limited special
anniversary edition may well still be the director’s most critically acclaimed
work to date and debatably the pinnacle of Bill Paxton’s acting career.
Ordinary rural Wright County, Minnesota based feed mill bookkeeper
Hank Mitchell (Bill Paxton) and his pregnant librarian wife Sarah (Bridget
Fonda) lead a quiet simple life in between hanging out with Hank’s slow older
brother Jacob (Billy Bob Thornton) and their alcoholic friend Lou Chambers
(Brent Briscoe from Mulholland Drive).
One snowy morning they chase a fox into the woods where they
inadvertently discover a crashed airplane.
Curious, Hank peeks inside to find both the dead pilot and a bag
containing approximately $4.4 million dollars.
Hank’s first instinct is to turn the money into the police but his
comrades persuade him otherwise into hiding it with A Simple Plan of
riding out the winter season waiting for the snow and ice to melt and for the
plane to be found at which point they’ll prospectively divvy up the money
amongst themselves and move out of the state.
However, keeping the cat in the bag proves much harder and deadlier than
any of them anticipated.
A somber and downbeat Midwestern-fried crime-thriller with
odes to Macbeth and John Huston’s The Tresure of the Sierra Madre
(incidentally Sam Raimi’s all-time favorite film), A Simple Plan is
something of a tragic answer to fellow colleagues Joel and Ethan Coen’s 1996
winter (also Minnesota set) neo-noir Fargo albeit with a much darker
patina. Whereas the Coen film remains
timelessly unclassifiable in their brand of Midwestern-gothic snark, Raimi’s
film is the other side of the coin where ordinary folks pining for the fruits
of the American dream will sell their souls for a taste of that glistening
gold. One key factor the Coen team didn’t
have access to yet was actor Billy Bob Thornton who all but naturally inhabits
their world of intellectually dim yet morally complex, violently driven characters
who seem unrelatable until we see a bit of ourselves in them. Let it be said Bill Paxton is a revelation
here in his most impassioned and fully committed performance of his career,
playing an educated everyman caught in the middle of a life-changing moral
quandary. Equally strong is Bridget
Fonda who previously cameoed in Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness but here
comes into her own in a powerful supporting performance. Oh and look for Office Space heavy
Gary Cole in an unlikely bit as an FBI agent with behind his eyes than he’s
telling.
From Canadian-Estonian Frequency cinematographer Alar
Kivilo’s wintry crow-covered woodsy visuals interspersed with frumpy lived-in
midwestern homesteads to Danny Elfman’s startlingly understated American Gothic
soundscape unbecoming of his usual Tim Burton or Oingo Boingo notes, A
Simple Plan looks and sounds appropriately dour and foreboding. Underneath all of this plain ordinary
normalcy awaits a simmering underbelly of violence and double-crossing all for
a price with our cast of morally conflicted antiheroes “sorting” it out amongst
themselves. The film is also a minor triumph
of production design from Patrizia von Brandenstein best known for Amadeus and
The Untouchables, realistically creating a believably midwestern
Minnesota world.
Released theatrically in 1998, though the film came under
budget in ticket sales it was a critical darling out of the gate with lavish
praise heaped upon Billy Bob Thornton’s performance and novelist Scott B. Smith’s
adapted screenplay of his own text both receiving Academy Award
nominations. Named ‘one of the Best
Films of 1998’ by Siskel and Ebert who also recommended Bill Paxton be campaigned
for Best Actor at the Oscars, the film is a triumph for Sam Raimi in his most
critically well received film of his oeuvre up to that point and was a key
stepping-stone for Billy Bob Thornton in a mainstream career-launching
role. Looking back at it years later in
Arrow Video’s stacked director supervised-and-approved 4K restoration, the film
while perhaps overshadowed by its obvious progenitor nevertheless finds its own
footing as a Midwestern Gothic slice of macabre crime thriller studying how
ordinary nobodies trying to lead some measure of a good life can fall easy prey
to temptation, avarice and going to any lengths to keep themselves from being
discovered. Maybe the most powerful
possible Sam Raimi film.
--Andrew Kotwicki
