A Simple Plan — The Word That Ruins Them Is “But”

Three men in the snow agree to do the right thing, and then one of them says “but.”

The plane has been sitting out there long enough to be half-swallowed by the drifts when they stumble onto it, the dead pilot frosted to his controls like something the winter grew, and in the back a duffel bag holding $4.4 million in used bills. Hank Mitchell is the educated one. He has the job, the pregnant wife, the good name in town, and he says the right thing right away: they turn it in. Listen to how he says it, though. He recites it the way you recite a rule you have never once had to pay for. Then his brother Jacob starts talking, and their friend Lou starts talking, and inside that cold fuselage Hank reaches for the smallest, most expensive word a decent man can say. But. Nobody would ever know. But it has to be drug money, so who exactly gets hurt. But they could just sit on it until spring, careful as churchgoers, and burn every dollar the first time anything smells wrong. That is the whole plan. It is simple. The movie takes two unhurried hours to show you the full retail price of simple, and I believed every cent.

What startles most is who made it. A Simple Plan is Sam Raimi holding perfectly still, and the stillness is not a costume, it is the meaning. This is the director whose camera once tore through the Tennessee woods after screaming teenagers, and here he nails the tripod down and forbids himself everything: no crash zooms, no canted angles, no gleeful rushing force. The camera plants its feet and watches, because this horror is procedural rather than demonic, and procedure needs room to happen at the volume of ordinary conversation. Alar Kivilo photographs the Minnesota cold as a flat, shadowless white, a landscape with nowhere to hide and nothing to look forward to, and the snow becomes the story’s clock. It is the only thing keeping the evidence covered, and every person on that screen can feel spring coming. Danny Elfman, another maximalist gone quiet for the occasion, writes a detuned wintry score that sounds like a music box abandoned in the woods, and the crows hold their posts on the branches like a jury that has already voted. Every choice of style is saying the same sentence: this was always going to happen, and weather was the only thing putting it off.

Bill Paxton carries the picture on pure normalcy, and normalcy turns out to be the scariest instrument in it. Hank never curdles into a monster; that is the film’s most frightening decision. He stays reasonable, apologetic, well-spoken, through every escalation, a man using a good mind not to see what he is doing but to build sentences in which what he just did was necessary. Billy Bob Thornton’s Jacob, in the performance that earned him an Oscar nomination, is the broken conscience of the thing, slow and gentle and unemployable, and he understands the moral weather better than anyone precisely because he owns nothing worth protecting. Midway through, he asks his brother a question that goes through the film like a stone through pond ice: does Hank ever feel evil. Hank says no. Jacob is the only soul in the movie honest enough to have needed to ask.

Then there is Sarah, and Sarah is where the cold really gets in. Bridget Fonda was undervalued for this on release and the work looks sharper every year: a pregnant librarian who hears about the money at her own kitchen table, pauses exactly one beat, and starts running quality control. Put some of it back, she says, so the count in the plane looks untouched. Every escalation she authors arrives dressed as household prudence, each death downstream of her filed under insurance, a woman applying coupon logic to damnation. She never raises her voice. She never touches a weapon. And she proves the film’s worst news, which is that the appetite was never out there in the snow. It was already home, waiting at the table.

Be fair about the seams. The last act leans on a stranger who walks in carrying exactly the right lie at exactly the right moment, and the reveal that springs the trap clicks shut with a neatness the film’s loose, wintry realism spent ninety minutes teaching you not to expect. Sarah’s turn comes a half-step quicker than the movie’s patience everywhere else; one more scene of her hesitating and her arithmetic would land harder still. Seams, though. Not cracks. The picture is built too honestly for them to spread.

And the ending is as unsparing as anything American movies managed this decade. The money was marked all along, every serial number on record, worthless from the second they lifted the bag out of the snow. The friend, the neighbor, the brother, all of it traded for paper valued at exactly nothing, and the film closes on Hank feeding the bills into a fire, the single part of the plan he finally carries out on schedule. Raimi is working in borrowed Coen country here, and he out-freezes Fargo by removing its warmth: no decent cop arrives to shake her head at the sadness, only a man who will spend the rest of his life being spoken to kindly by a wife who keeps count of what it cost. A Simple Plan is the great American film about the distance between being good and being untested, and its verdict has not thawed. Nobody in this movie thinks he is the villain. That was the plan’s one true simplicity.