Andrew Worsdale Movie of the week
Money lust, capers gone wrong and innocent heroes caught up in crime are strong generic gimmicks in movies. Alfred Hitchcock excelled in the art of throwing innocent men into conspiratorial affairs. In North by Northwest he had Cary Grant as a light hearted advertising executive who’s abducted, framed and hounded across the United States and finds himself assuming another man’s identity.
One of the classic caper-gone-wrong movies is Stanley Kubrick’s The Killing, the genius director’s second feature. It had Sterling Hayden as an ex-con who gathers together a bunch of small-time crooks who plan to rob a race track. The heist goes as scheduled, but the aftermath is a complete mess as human greed and deceit get in the way and the baddies – even though they are the movie’s heroes – are undone.
Thenthere’s John Huston’s 1948 The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, which had Humphrey Bogart as the leader of a trio caught up in a gold-lust adventure in Mexico. Bogart changes from a likeable guy into a paranoid madman as a result of the quest for precious metal and filthy lucre. His gold destroys him, and at the end he is cornered and slaughtered by ruthless bandits, and the treasure is scattered in the wind.
Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan, which is based on Scott B Smith’s 1993 novel, is centred around the same ideas used by these great movies: innocent individuals who are corrupted and turn against each other because of ill-gotten gains.
It stars Bill Paxton as a very nice guy in a small Minnesota town. He is happily married to Sarah (Bridget Fonda), who is expecting a baby. When Hank’s half-wit brother, Jacob (Billy Bob Thornton in an Oscar-nominated over-the-top performance which, to my mind, is high school pantomime stuff), and his redneck buddy, Lou (Brent Briscoe), arrive, everything changes.
Trekking through the woods after a freak accident, the trio come across a single- engine aeroplane that has crashed. There’s a gym bag with $4-million inside. Lou exclaims, “It’s the American dream in a goddamn gym bag!”
The unemployed Jacob and Lou see the money as manna from heaven; Hank the conservative moralist initially resists, but is persuaded to take the money as it’s probably from a drug deal gone bad, and has no traceable owner. He makes a “simple plan” – no one should tell anybody anything; he will hold on to the cash until they’re sure no one’s looking for it, then they’ll split the boodle in three.
Tears in the fabric appear soon as the group start spilling the beans to wives, friends and associates. In the fine tradition of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, greed, paranoia and bad luck all play a role, and the body count rises. Even Sarah becomes an all-too- willing accomplice, proving, as one critic said, that “motherhood and murder aren’t always mutually exclusive”.
The film has many elements in common with the Coen brothers’ Fargo and Blood Simple -slices of life about outlandish crimes with average geezers stuck in over their heads, blending Grand Guignol and beautiful, foreboding, snow-bound landscapes which are splattered in blood.
It’s a perfectly staged thriller that owes much to Raymond Chandler, Edgar Allan Poe and the aforementioned films. In fact, the film’s assured opening, which features a bunch of squawking black crows in the snow, has explicit echoes of DH Lawrence’s The Fox and Poe’s The Raven, both of which were made into films that are by no means as successful as this one.
Raimi is best known for his cult gore-fests, The Evil Dead and Darkman. The Evil Dead was a sensational, bad-taste, tongue-in-cheek horror flick which had a bunch of clean-cut teenagers holed up in a holiday retreat only to find the woods coming alive and devils pitching up to possess the living. Darkman has Liam Neeson as a brilliant surgeon who is left for dead after his laboratory is blown up. He survives and emerges as an avenging angel who uses temporary masks to impersonate and destroy his enemies.
Both these films were short on characterisation and had simplistic plots, but Raimi revelled in his technique and became a cult movie figure through his use of campy histrionics, breathtaking visuals and his juggling of humour, pathos, horror and violence within a kinetic, truly modern cinematic lan.
With A Simple Plan, the director seems to have toned down his over-the-top culty style, and has brought us a movie that concentrates on character development and complex human emotions. There are still a touch of tongue in cheekness and a couple of grisly sight gags which have previously been his trademark.
Paxton and Thornton are perfect as the brothers coping with lingering childhood animosity, and Fonda is great as the perfect, sensible and loving new mum with a chilly heart. Patrizia von Brandenstein’s production design subtly hints at economic and psychological differences between the main characters, and cinematographer Alar Kivilo’s widescreen images manage to be clean but also sinister without over-playing their role as in previous Raimi movies.
It’s a brooding and relatively reserved picture, and fans of Raimi’s extravagant earlier work may be disappointed. But in the way it explores familiar themes that have been mined many times before in the movies it comes up with a couple of gems. It’s a worthy member of the line of films that say greed is not good and the humble, well-meaning, ordinary Joe will always trip over himself, even get involved in killing people, when ill-gotten gains are up for grabs.