Snow Day Cinema: A Simple Plan (1998)

In Sam Raimi's thriller, the hearts are as cold as the environment.

Hey all. As the weather turns frigid and we’re stuck in the coldest, greyest months of the year, it made my thoughts turn to one of my favorite cold weather movies.

The world of Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan looks familiar. It’s the Midwest, possibly Ohio. Snow covers the rural fields and the characters’ homes are small and plain. It could take place just a few miles down the road from me. These characters could be my neighbors. Their dilemma and choices could be mine. 

That’s the most terrifying thing about Raimi’s adaptation of Scott Smith’s best-selling thriller. Behind smiling faces and kind words lie black hearts. Is it evil or is it common? Are those things mutually exclusive? 

On paper, the film plays like an ethical exercise: Three buddies find a crashed plane in the woods with $4 million that they assume is drug money. Do they turn it in? Do they keep it? If it’s dirty money, will anyone care?

Those are the bones for a solid thriller, but what elevates Smith’s book and Raimi’s film (Smith wrote the screenplay) is the way the film creates its characters and weaves conflict among them based on class, intelligence and blood. What could be a simple noir exercise becomes something richer, almost Shakespearean. 

Hank Mitchell is the quintessential Bill Paxton character. Paxton, who died too soon in 2017, was one of the great everyman character actors. He plays Mitchell as an intelligent man who is living a good life in a small town. He has a nice house, a beautiful wife and a baby on the way. But we know he’s educated and works at the feed store; he’s known to toss around big words to people whose intelligence might not be on par with his own. There’s resentment and disappointment that creeps into his eyes once the possibility of a better life is brought up. 

Contrast that with his brother, Jacob, in a career-best performance by Billy Bob Thornton. Jacob’s the younger brother, the one who didn’t make out so well in the gene pool. Thornton brings Jacob to life with long, greasy hair and glasses with duct tape around the rim; occasionally, he sports a bloody tissue where Jacob cut himself shaving. But it’s not a big performance; Thornton internalizes Jacob’s awkwardness and insecurity. There’s a heartbreaking moment where he confesses to Hank that he’s never even kissed a girl and never had a girlfriend except for a time when someone played a trick on him. Jacob’s intelligence and social graces are lacking, but he’s also the film’s conscience. His stupid decisions compound a simple decision into a plot that involves murder and deceit, but he’s also the only one to confess that he “feels evil.” Compounding matters between the brothers is that Jacob had a closer relationship with their deceased parents than Hank did, and he brings information to light about their past that serve as jackhammers to the elder brother’s psyche. 

The wild card is Lou, Jacob’s drinking buddy. Always with a dirty joke at the ready and a beer on hand, there’s no surprise that Lou is the person Jacob feels closer to. Brent Briscoe plays him as a fun-loving, crude drunk, but there’s also a simmering despair. Lou’s marriage seems an inch away from falling apart, his life coming apart at the seams. The only thing keeping him together are his friends and the promise of a big payday. For each of them, the money in the woods presents an opportunity; for Lou, it’s an only hope, and Briscoe plays him as seething with rage and regret. 

Smith’s script creates these characters and then lets them bounce off each other. He leans hard on divided loyalties between friends and family and the way those relationships can be easily manipulated. Hank’s intelligence gives him an advantage over the other two, but his pride is also his undoing, and much of the film’s tension comes from the way a good idea suddenly goes stomach-churningly wrong. Its horror is in how quickly Hank acclimates to these evil deeds and how coolly he begins to process them and find a solution. 

The film’s strongest performance, however, may be in Bridget Fonda’s Sara Mitchell. Initially self-righteous and aghast that her husband would consider taking the money, when the opportunity of a new life presents itself in $4 million in unmarked bills, she quickly becomes a calculating schemer, a Lady Macbeth who directs her husband’s decisions. Fonda never tips over into overt evil; Sara never commits a murder. But rather, the money creates a sense of desperation; in one late scene, she describes the life she and Hank will have if they give up the money. The truth is there: Even if they do the right thing, the knowledge of what could have been will destroy their family. 

Raimi made this film six years after Army of Darkness and four years before Spider-Man. It’s his best film. His wilder instincts are reined in, forcing Raimi to create tension and darkness through character and situation. He turns the screws shrewdly, quickly escalating a seemingly harmless crime into a web of lies, manipulation and murder. The energetic visuals he’s known for are reined in, aside from one sequence involving a shotgun, but the film thrums with portents of doom and despair, even if some (repeated shots of crows, an opening sequence involving a stalking fox) are ladled on a bit thick. 

What’s most notable is how Raimi creates a noir that visually feels nothing like we’re used to in the genre. This isn’t a film of deep shadows and crooked angles. Rather, like Fargo, the snow-swept fields create an atmosphere of frigidity and despair, bleak and barren. Several scenes in the Mitchell home are flat and plain; a commentary on the everyday life that hides unspeakable evil. 

The result is a thriller that feels richer and deeper than we usually get in the genre, a story of greed and murder that feels personal and heartbreaking. It’s one of the great crime films of the last 25 years and a gem aching to be rediscovered.