Dark birds, a dim brother, and 'A Simple Plan'

COURTESY PARAMOUNT PICTURES Easy money turns brotherly love into horrible evil.

In films like Army of Darkness and The Quick and the Dead, director Sam Raimi always wore his artifices on his sleeve. Therefore, these first moments of his thriller A Simple Plan feel like a clumsy opening formality. "Once I get through all this mush at the start where I establish how decent these folks are," Raimi seems to be saying, "then it'll get bloody interesting."

For a while, A Simple Plan does proceed along these lines. Hank meets his brother Jacob (Billy Bob Thornton) and Jacob's friend Lou (Brent Briscoe)--two chuckling-yokel types who pee their names in the snow and generally galumph around acting dim and easily corruptible--to visit the grave of Hank and Jacob's father. On the way back home, one of the famous local foxes scampers in front of their truck, causing them to swerve and crash. Lou and Jacob follow the critter into the woods, grunting yokelish things about revenge. Hank follows, and the three of them discover that the fox incident has deposited them at just the right spot for them to find a small crashed plane containing a dead body and a bag full of $4.4 million.

Up to this point, A Simple Plan seems dumbly forthright in its narrative intentions. Raimi clearly presents Hank as the center of the story, and sets him up against his two companions of dubious intellect. It's eminently sensible, then, that Hank demands to be made steward of the money until the three can determine where it's from, and whether anybody else is looking for it. It's key that Hank's decision appears so correct, because Raimi devotes the rest of A Simple Plan to expertly demolishing both Hank's notions of control and our perceptions of him as a protagonist.

The cast's performances are uniformly spare and effective. Paxton plays well off his blandly heroic work in stuff like Twister. He often wears the same determined-yet-worried look that he used in that film when the tornado was bearing down on him, only this time he's covering up incredibly brutal crimes. The deeper and more elaborate his lies to the county sheriff (Chelcie Ross) become, the more incredible it seems that he still sounds pretty much like that good guy who works at the feed mill.

Billy Bob Thornton follows a similar path, but handles it even better. Building upon his previous work in Sling Blade to create the simple, sad-sack Jacob, Thornton likewise inverts this stereotypical image. Jacob appears to be panicky and incapable of decision-making; he wav-ers between his brother and his friend when the two become suspicious of one another. There's a moment when Jacob appears to be ruining Hank's feverish scheme to "protect" himself from Lou, but then Thornton quietly reveals that Jacob had control of the situation the whole time. It's a great moment, and it displays the movie's shift of agency from Hank to Jacob.

The interplay between the two brothers is the best aspect of A Simple Plan. Jacob gradually becomes more and more self-aware as the movie progresses, and he slowly provides details that make Hank emerge as the one to blame for their father's death. Hank's efforts to manipulate Jacob and control the situation steadily grow less effective. By the movie's climax, which works as a twisted parody of Of Mice and Men, their relationship is completely reversed and Hank has lost his ability to influence events.

Despite the wonderful central relationship in A Simple Plan, other aspects of the film's world aren't fully realized. Bridget Fonda's character is an especially weak point. Her job at the library may ground her in real-world concerns, but ultimately she's still the Manipulative Woman Who Drives Her Man To Murder. Likewise, Scott B. Smith introduces a nakedly evil character late in the movie, and this seems to show the author's hand too much--it feels like Smith wants to excuse Hank's actions by comparison. Still, it does provide a thrilling climax, and Raimi's dwelt in the realm of genre work long enough to know how to create very tight suspense scenes.

Despite A Simple Plan's artificial finish, it's an entertaining character-driven thriller, and a more sustained trip than something like Army of Darkness. Raimi cleverly addresses the apparent one-dimensionality of his earlier work, and if this is his application for a pass to leave the Country of Xena, then he may, at the very least, fly coach.

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