Putting his Evil Dead past far behind him, director Sam Raimi displays an unexpected maturity and a real skill for building and sustaining tension in the taut psychological thriller, A Simple Plan, a moral tale of lives corrupted and destroyed by money and greed.
Adapted by Scott B. Smith from his own novel, the film evokes Joel and Ethan Coen's Fargo - both in its snowcapped Minnesota landscape and in its theme of ordinary people finding themselves out of their depth in murky schemes. Raimi's film, which is also laced with black humour, proves just as satisfying and as compelling as Fargo.
A Simple Plan features Bill Paxton as Hank Mitchell, an unassuming accountant at a smalltown grain mill, Bridget Fonda as his loving, heavily-pregnant wife, Sarah, and Billy Bob Thornton as his slow-witted brother, Jacob, who spends most of his time with the boozy Lou (Brent Briscoe) in aimless time-filling pursuits.
Their lives are changed for ever when the men happen upon the wreckage of a small aircraft, inside which is a corpse - and a bag containing over $4 million. Easily persuading themselves that this is money illegally obtained through drug-dealing, they decide they should keep it for themselves. Jacob and Lou want to start spending the money right away, but Hank proposes a simple plan, that they wait for a time and then take the money if it is not reclaimed.
This proves much easier said than done, and as one wrong move unfailingly leads to another in the screenplay's snowballing scheme of things, they find themselves up to their necks in a situation that's spinning wildly out of control. Raimi piles twist upon twist, all the while turning up the tension with a precision worthy of Hitchcock. The principal theme of this thoughtful moral drama has been reworked in countless films, but in Raimi's hands it makes for riveting cinema, and its chilly atmosphere of pervasive anxiety and freezing temperatures is enhanced by Danny Elfman's brooding score. Although Billy Bob Thornton received an Oscar nomination for his nuanced portrayal of Jacob, it is the often underestimated Bill Paxton in the central role who anchors the movie with a cool, low-key performance that grounds the film in plausibility as the plot twists and turns.
