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If an aeroplane crashes in the snowy woods and no one sees you help yourself to its cargo of $4.4 million, presumably ill gotten gains, is it stealing? Think you'd just give it back? But what if you are with your doltish brother and his drunken pal and they insist on keeping the booty? They're going to take it anyway. You might as well get your share, no?
Such is the tragic dilemma that vexes Hank Mitchell (Bill Paxton) in A Simple Plan, director Sam Raimi's neo-Fargo morality saga set in the starkly shivering plains of the northernmost Midwest. Hank's slow-witted brother, Jacob (superbly realised by Billy Bob Thornton), and his distasteful best friend, Lew (Brent Briscoe), immediately decide that the dead pilot was ferrying drug money when his private plane went down. It's really no one's money, or so their argument goes. Hank, whose wife, Sarah (Bridget Fonda), is pregnant with their first child, demurs at first. But it doesn't take too much to convince him that one-third of the loot would go a long way to ease his pending financial burdens.
His mind racing for a plan, the way it will several more times before the film is over -- each time a turn of events forces him to rethink and thus compromise his ethical structure -- Hank finally agrees to filch the cash, but with one big caveat. He alone will keep the plunder until spring; by then they should know if anyone is looking for it. Then they'll split it up. It is a simple plan. What harm can come of it? Although besotted Lew and simpleton Jacob have long reduced the matter to a case of finders keepers-losers weepers, they begrudgingly accept the wisdom of their only employed member (Hank works in a feed store) as a matter of expedience. With this scenario in place, the phrase, one thing leads to another, has rarely been more ominously appropriate. The nightmare unfolds before your very eyes.
But don't blame all the bad moves and miscalculations on just Hank, Jacob or Lew. There is a fourth conspirator, a silent partner so to speak. It is Sarah, the film's most enigmatic character, portrayed with novel mystery by Bridget Fonda. Although both married men (lonely, cretinous Jacob, who reminds one of Lenny in Of Mice and Men, is sadly single) promise not to let the wives in on the find just yet, Hank barely has his coat off when he begins posing what-ifs to Sarah about finding a huge sum of money. In a family way, the serene picture of middle class values, she immediately notes that any such suspicious fortune would, of course, have no place in their lives.
But Sarah has an uncanny intuition. As soon as she realises that hubby really isn't hypothesising, she turns on a dime. Her demeanour changes as abruptly as cascading Venetian blinds darken a room. Rolling up her sleeves, she goes into full Lady Macbeth mode. Take $50,000 back to the plane, she urges. Nobody would leave that much behind; they'll think that's all there was. Pretty smart, huh? Wifey's about-face both frightens and bemuses. One speculates how far beneath the surface of our personalities such sinister contingency plans lurk in remission. In any case, Sarah's instigation will prove divisive to the partners in crime. A dangerous paranoia soon sets in among the troika.
The title of writer Scott B. Smith's screenplay, which he adapted from his novel, invokes a poetic irony that echoes throughout the film. It is his mordant contention, ably interpreted with foreboding panache by filmmaker Raimi, that there can be nothing simple about keeping $4.4 million that's not yours. Told to the icy backdrop of a dispiriting landscape, the chilling fable is never preachy. Curiously, it ventures no spiritual explanation per se for the insane set of violent events that follows.
Rather, director Raimi leaves it to the viewer to speculate why such strong forces of adversity attach themselves so firmly to the culprits. Surely the hapless trio has been cursed with a Hitchcockian comeuppance. Maybe it's Mother Nature reacting, her order violated by their massive synergy of chutzpah and stupidity. Or perhaps they are sabotaged by their own guilt, subconsciously causing them bad luck at every turn. It's certainly something to ponder, along with all the haunting questions of morality the movie so engagingly posits. At some junctures, the chain reaction quagmire that Hank and crew unwittingly unleash upon themselves will have your mouth agape.
This black comedy of errors is tough and sombre psychology, relieved only on occasion by the sheer idiocy of its characters' self-imposed hell. Like dreaming about winning the lottery, you can't help but speculate if you'd keep the money. Certainly, Hank's example would caution against it. His fall from grace, made credible by his everyman persona, is an astounding degeneration to behold. A snowbound variation on Treasure of The Sierra Madre, director Raimi's beautifully acted movie proves that, when it comes to riches, even A Simple Plan can make for some very perplexing behaviour.
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