A Simple Plan

viewed Friday, September 17, 1999 on video

A Simple Plan has a plot that starts off, well, very simple, teetering on the brink of cliche.  Three men in a small town find hidden treasure while hunting, and scheme to keep it among themselves, with greed and paranoia lurking not too far in the narrative distance.  On video, the first half-hour goes by like a made for TV movie -- the town seems boxed in, the characters propped up by our recognizing their type.  Director Sam Raimi seems to have wanted to tone down his over-the-top zoom and boom technique as seen in Darkman and Army of Darkness.  But that graphic novel look is his stamp, and without it he's just another journeyman hammering out another Hallmark Hall of Fame mantlepiece.  The only visible hints of Raimi are the uncommonly large crows loitering around the loot, and the scene where a woman is sent flying across a kitchen from a shotgun blast. 

The dim and dour story is happily enlivened by an intriguing rendering of fraternal devotion and a tremendous performance by Billy Bob Thornton.  With two or three amazing scenes, he all but steals the show.  He seems to have the simpleton market cornered, though like his slopeheaded hero in Sling Blade, the idiot in this movie has a lot of heart fueling his dim mind.  His mannerisms -- the contorted face, the occasional stutter -- are aren't subtle, but he plays it offhand enough to make it believable, not to mention entertaining.  The scene when he suddenly plays off his brother against his best friend is phenomenal, even better than his final despearate plea for death.  Bill Paxton also has his best scenes with Thornton, since that's when, with merely a guilt-ridden glance at at Billy Bob, all the grief of being the privileged brother in an underprivileged family descends on him.  In those moments, his deadpan artifice of calm comes under fire, and he can feel his own hypocrisy.

I can't ignore Bridget Fonda as Paxton's wife, whose ripe and ruddy maternal look seems to spring more from the plan she's helped to hatch for her husband than from her imminent motherhood.  It's like her mind has come to life after years of shelving books at the town library.  Fonda is so inextricably immersed in the immobile pregnancy of her part that when she finally lets out her deep-seeded hick housewife grievances, it's unnerving to hear her voice summon her Aunt Jane's hysteria.

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