Too Quick to Kill

by Thomas Burchfield

There's much to recommend in A Simple Plan one of the best and most intelligent thrillers to come along in awhile. On one level it's an ambitious character study of how desperation, greed and guilt intertwine in the lives of some desperate small town Minnesotans. On another it's a thriller that bids to be called Hitchcockian without resorting to empty camera tricks ala some of the Master's more desperate acolytes.

Here three men, Hank Mitchell (Bill Paxton) his brother Jacob (Billy Bob Thornton) and Lou (Brent Briscoe) stumble on a downed plane in the snowy wilderness. Inside, along with the crow-pecked corpse, they find a duffel bag containing four million dollars. Hank, the married, comparatively well-off sensible one wants to call the police right away. But Jacob and Lou, two of the town's most successful losers, play on Hank's greedy inner child and convince him to keep the crash and the money a secret. Hank agrees, but only on the condition that he keep control over the money until they find out whether it's safe to keep or whether it must be destroyed to avoid discovery.

Of course, in a movie like this, Murphy's Law predominates. It's only a question of how and when. Trouble starts almost immediately when brother Jacob lets it slip to the sheriff about the plane. The next slip comes when Hank, after making his buddies swear on their thick skulls they won't tell anyone else, goes home and promptly tells his pregnant wife Sarah (Bridget Fonda) of their find by dumping the money on the living room table (one of a couple narrative twists that bothered me). Sarah immediately becomes a Lady Macbeth-like co-conspirator. After she discovers that the money was ransom for a kidnapping, she tells Hank to return a small portion of it to the plane, so when it's discovered, the authorities will think the money was split up by the kidnappers.

No, it's not a good idea, especially when Hank brings hapless brother Jacob along. Jacob panics when a passerby happens on the scene and then all hell really breaks loose, as the characters find them caught in a cruel whirlpool of suspicion, paranoia, murder and tragedy.

Genremeister Sam Raimi deserves much credit for stepping outside the comic book realm where he established himself with films like The Evil Dead and Darkman. It's rare to find a director like him willing to set aside pyrotechnics and, for once, make a film where character, story and incident are what counts. It's a refreshing step numerous directors should consider. His cinematographer, Alar Kivilo, captures the bleak bitter beauty of those Northern Midwestern winters I remember so well from my youth.

Every thriller can be measured by what you could call the Knot Factor: that is the degree to which a film knots your stomach up by virtue of things like plot, story, pacing, editing, atmosphere, script and, most importantly, as Hitchcock always insisted, character.

In this A Simple Plan's knot loosens, specifically in Bill Paxton as Hank Mitchell. Whether it's Scott Smith's script or Paxton himself (or both) Hank is never a believable character. It's difficult to tell whether he is a good man driven bad by greed or a simple sociopath who finds his calling. Ditto his driven wife who goes bad from the second she lays eyes on the money (which Hank never even tries to conceal from her. The film passes up a chance for major suspense here.) These people are ostensibly happy together as the film opens and so have no immediate motivation for their subsequent actions. Sarah's speech inserted late in the film revealing her misery at their stifled lives feels forced. Hank needs to struggle more with the desperate actions he takes. But he's too quick to act to rouse much sympathy, nor he is evil enough for an audience to revel in his transgression. It's as though Smith's script tries to take him both ways and leaves us feeling as cold and dull as February snow. This flattens the film's suspense.

That leaves Billy Bob Thornton's Jacob as the both the film's emotional and, surprisingly, moral center. With his long, stringy hair, baseball cap and thick glasses taped together, Thornton reaches the soul of a small town slug who thinks money will bring him love and slowly realizes in his poor dim mind, that it will bring him only unbearable misery. I knew many like him and his buddy Lou (Brent Briscoe is also perfect) in my Midwestern days and I've never seen them portrayed on screen with such gritty authenticity. I could almost smell the beer and damp surrounding them. I enjoyed the company of people like Jacob and Lou in short doses, but I also saw the limits of their lives. It's the kind of portrayal of lowlife that would make another master of this milieu, Sam Peckinpah, smile with poignant, bitter truth.

POSTHOC EMOTICON RATING-- :-)

[Thomas Burchfield can be reached at TBDeluxe@aol.com and appears regularly in Swing Time magazine.]

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