A SIMPLE PLAN (59)

Directed by: Sam Raimi

Starring: Bill Paxton, Billy Bob Thornton, Brent Briscoe, Bridget Fonda

The Pitch: Three Life-battered losers in the wintry Midwest find the wreckage of a plane buried in the snow ; inside the plane is a briefcase, and inside the case are 4.4 million dollars.

Theo Sez: A film I admire, for its mordant worldview and escalating paranoia, for the way it shifts its moral centre halfway through and for its general air of good writing (it's the detail that does it, like the bit about eating in restaurants only on special occasions - "skipping the appetizer, having dessert at home" - in Fonda's caustic speech about "the way things used to be") ; but it does very little for me, even less on second viewing, and I'm not sure why. Partly, no doubt - despite the folly of trying to second-guess a film's narrative - it's that the characters' behaviour often seems incomprehensible, hence contrived (what's the point of taking Jacob along - to "keep watch", purportedly - when returning the money? isn't it asking for trouble to show Lou the tape of his 'confession' instead of keeping it in reserve for when it's needed?) ; mostly, however, it's a question of attitude. The juxtaposition of clean-cut Paxton and the two bone-headed yokels is too extreme (it might've worked if we could still see traces of the redneck he used to be, but he seems to come from a different planet) and, more problematically, seems to turn the film from the classic, quasi-tragic model of a perfect plan scuppered by a single fatal flaw (stuff like the stray pigeon in TOPKAPI, or the double-bass caught in the door in THE LADYKILLERS) to a catalogue of disasters that's obviously doomed from the word go - it's less a cautionary tale about greed than about getting involved with really stupid people. There's a pocket-nihilism at work here, saying that people are naturally amoral and self-destructive - which you may find "dark" or just flippant and reductive, according to taste. Raimi seeks a middle way between doom-laden symbolism (those damned crows) and sly self-parody (ditto), but the result lacks definition or larger meaning, as tidily barren as its title : it might as well be called "Three Guys, A Girl and A Bag Of Money".