With A Simple Plan, Coen brothers pal Sam Raimi made his own snowy Minnesota crime thriller
Film Features Watch This
Watch This offers movie recommendations inspired by new releases, premieres, current events, or occasionally just our own inscrutable whims. This week: The fourth season of FX’s small-screen Fargo starts, so we’re singling out “Coenesque” movies, i.e. ones influenced by or imitative of the work of those famous sibling filmmakers.
A Simple Plan (1998)
Between 1984 and 1986, one of the hippest places to hang out in Los Angeles might’ve been a three-bedroom house in Silver Lake, where brothers Joel and Ethan Coen lived with brothers Sam and Ivan Raimi, joined at various times by Frances McDormand (who found the place, and later married Joel), Holly Hunter, and Kathy Bates. At the time, Sam Raimi had written and directed the stylish and witty horror classic The Evil Dead, and the Coens had made the hip neo-noir Blood Simple. The latter pair had also contributed ideas to the screenplay for Raimi’s slapstick gangland picture Crimewave, and would later help shape his cult-favorite 1990 superhero movie Darkman. Raimi returned the favors by collaborating on the script for the Coens’ 1994 screwball comedy The Hudsucker Proxy. In a lot of ways, these guys were all fellow travelers.
As the ’90s progressed, however, the filmmakers’ paths began to diverge: Raimi kept making oddball hybrids of broad comedy and B-pictures (like Army Of Darkness and The Quick And The Dead), while his old roommates made movies that won prizes at major international film festivals. The Coens completed their assimilation into the Hollywood establishment with 1996’s Fargo, an arty and arch crime dramedy nominated for seven Oscars. Raimi then belatedly made his own unexpected play for respectability, accepting a last-minute fill-in assignment to direct an adaptation of Scott Smith’s acclaimed 1993 novel A Simple Plan, another thriller about ordinary people enticed by greed and need. The movie even shifts the setting of Smith’s book from Ohio to Minnesota, where Fargo is set (though the locations were actually picked by two of the directors previously attached to the project, Mike Nichols and John Boorman).
A Simple Plan is well-acted, atmospheric, and gripping. But what’s especially remarkable is how restrained it is, given who’s behind the camera. Even in the Coens’ more “serious” movies (like Fargo), there are loopy moments and eccentric characters. And most of Raimi’s post-Simple Plan pictures, like Drag Me To Hell and the Spider-Man trilogy, can get pretty gonzo. But Raimi eschews flashy camera moves in A Simple Plan, relying on precisely composed, mostly static medium and long shots—peppered with a lot of close-up reactions—to tell Smith’s story of two working-class brothers who find over four million dollars inside a downed airplane in the woods, and then have to resort to lying and violence to protect it.
Raimi’s approach lets the movie’s excellent cast carry its meaning. The late Bill Paxton gave the best performance of his career as Hank Mitchell, a feed-store manager who lives in a nice house with his pregnant wife Sarah (Bridget Fonda). Billy Bob Thornton—Oscar-nominated for this role—plays Hank’s mild-mannered screw-up of an older brother, Jacob, who can’t hold a job and spends most of his days drinking beer and cracking jokes with his bitter buddy Lou (Brent Briscoe). The twisty plot tracks how every choice the Mitchell brothers make gets them deeper into trouble, but the story is really about how Hank has always felt burdened by Jacob, and how Jacob resents Hank’s snobbery.
Like Fargo, A Simple Plan proceeds on a path with its own cruel logic, getting increasingly tense. But unlike those of his buddies the Coens, Raimi’s tastes lean more toward gory horror than literary pulp, which may be why his A Simple Plan has such an unforgiving heart. Both movies are chilling tales of people who feel trapped by their dead-end jobs and suffocating families. But where Fargo suggests that even a cold, gray Minnesota landscape can sometimes be warm and inviting, A Simple Plan sees its small town as an inescapable trap, in which no one ever flies away but only crashes.
Availability: A Simple Plan is available to stream on Starz. It can also be rented or purchased from Amazon, Google Play, YouTube, Microsoft, Redbox, and VUDU.
84 Comments
Great movie but man the Lou character was annoying.
Yeah, but the movie puts you right in the seat of being in a situation where you have no choice but to rely on someone like that. Can you imagine knowing your survival depends upon the actions of two broke, drunken idiots?
The movie really makes you feel Hank’s desire to be rid of him.
Agreed, that’s where so much of the tension comes from – and the creepy moments where Hank realizes that Lou is not just a dumb bumbling good ol’ boy, but that he actually has a cold-hearted calculating sinister streak.
As much as I love most of his other work, this is probably my favorite Raimi film. Oh, who am I kidding? It’s Army of Darkness, but this one comes pretty close.
Oh, who am I kidding? It’s Army of Darkness, but this one comes pretty close. LOL. You’ve pretty much summed up my feeelings.
Well, I maybe do not love every single exact syllable of it.
This is a great companion piece to Fargo; the ever-ratcheting tension of people in over their heads making increasingly poor and irreversible decisions.And I’d argue that the Coens’ “eccentric characters” all still make sense as characters and not just something to laugh at. Buscemi and Stormare in Fargo are perfect examples. Their eccentricities inform their behavior.
I’ve read the Coens gave Raimi (apparently they’re old friends) tips for filming this movie that they had learned while filming Fargo – specifically on filming bright daylit snow and making it look bleak instead of glaring.
Both movies definitely make snow look like something to be endured for four months as opposed to played in, nothing but heavy skies and brutal cold. There’s a shot in Simple Plan of Paxton and Thornton outside their parents’ foreclosed farmhouse that is about the saddest thing you’ll see.
Yes! Same with the bank parking lot scene in Fargo, after Jerry is denied a loan by his father in law and realizes he’s out of options.
Love that scene. Not a word, just Jerry losing his shit.
Man, I don’t know how you talk about this movie and only barely mention Bridget Fonda. Watching this a few months ago for the 7th or 8th time made me once again wish she would come out of retirement. And speaking of people I wish would work more, what’s up with Scott Smith? He wrote this, and then one other great little horror novel (The Ruins) about 15 years later and there hasn’t been anything from him since.
Her breakdown at the end over how she really feels about their lives, when Paxton (SPOILERS FOR 20 YEAR-OLD MOVIE) says they have to burn the money, is heart-rending. Between that and his brother, his life is permanently ruined when they’re really just getting started with it.Let’s face it, this movie is bleak.
Another great line she has…“Nobody would ever believe that you would be capable of doing what you’ve done.”She delivers it as a reassurance, but it’s such an indictment of Paxton’s character and how he sees himself.
From what I remember – and this might be a painfully obvious take – I took it as at the beginning of the movie the wife (and to a lesser extent the awkward brother) was relatively satisfied with their lives. It was only after glimpsing the opportunity to have something more, and then having that pulled away, that she turned.
Agreed- it’s essentially a Lady Macbeth story
[Spoilers] Just him finding out that it was really fool’s gold all along, as it turned out that they did have a way to trace the money, so they could never have spent much of it before getting caught.
The moment the FBI agent tells him they spent the few hours they had with the money recording as many serial numbers as possible to they could trace it is exactly when things went permanently and finally to shit. Gut punch.
Preach.
omg, i hated “the ruins!” killer plants! “little shop of horrors” is more chilling. i call my 3 venus flytrap plants “the audreys.”
As a low-stakes little horror novel, I remember liking it. Never saw the movie, though.
The movie is OK but lacks the book’s sense of dread. Scott Smith wrote the screenplay for it, and made certain changes to make it more cinematic, such switching around what characters suffer which fate.It does, however, contain the great line, “Four Americans don’t just disappear!”
The book was fun and the movie is … also fun? There really is no way to make talking plants work off the page but hey they tried! Some gruesome FX anyhow.
Definitely went in expecting less than nothing from The Ruins, and got pleasantly surprised. Even the ending leaves it open to a potential massive downer, but it’s been so grim and tightly contained until that point that it still feels like a release.
I didn’t care for the ending of that book – it’s a natural conclusion to the story, but it’s so obvious that it makes the last third of the novel redundant. Once the characters realize they’re trapped, the story is over. There’s no additional plot, just some miserable events. Four or five chapters is way too long for a denouement.
That was exactly my experience, B Town. I went in thinking it was going to be absolutely dreadful B-movie schlock–maybe entertaining in its incompetence, but nothing more–and left saying “Hey! That was solid!” Nothing groundbreaking, necessarily, but effectively atmospheric and not mind-numbingly stupid. It’s a low bar, perhaps, but considering how few horror movies manage to clear it…
I heard bad things about the movie so never watched it, but the book is excellent — if A Simple Plan is about making a bad choice that leads to other worse choices, The Ruins is about making one bad choice that utterly fucks you, no matter what you do to overcome it. Bleak stuff! But Smith’s pacing and attention to detail make it work.
Don’t bother with the movie. I also liked the book.
He’s done a series called Civil on some channel. And also something called The Peripheral on Amazon.
yes! Bridget Fonda is superb in this. Doesn’t she manipulate the whole story? Been 20 years since I watched this
Fonda is great in this for sure. One of her best. I rewatched Singles at the beginning of the year and had the same wish – that she never stopped working. Alas….
You’re so dead on. Fonda’s speech about going to a restaurant and being afraid of the prices on the menu — should I get the appetizers? — was so viscerally accurate. And in further Bridget appreciation, how good was she in Singles? Maybe the acting bug will hit her again and she’ll return.
yeah i don’t get that, the guy writes two astonishingly good genre novels, 13 years apart, both turned into excellent genre films. it’s like he just tosses them off whenever he feels like it, nbd
Raimi showed more restraint than the author. The book was violent as hell, as I recall.SPOILERS FOR THE BOOKAs I recall, at the end of the book, Hank has to go into a convenience store to kill a bunch of innocent people with a Machete because he is trying to get the counterfeit money back.
Wut.Does the book set up this scene so that it’s actually believable that someone with reasonably-average intelligence would find it expedient to murder multiple innocents with a machete in order to recover counterfeit money?
It’s been years so I don’t remember all the buildup but I did have the thought, at the time, “this is a bit much”. But it was overall a good book and the whole point of it was “don’t start down that slippery slope, you won’t like where it ends”
I do believe Hank has to get the $100 bill from a small store and ends up killing the clerk and an unlucky shopper who caught him in his misdeed. I remember it was bloody.
I should add that he’s only trying to get like an incriminating $20 bill back. The rest of the money is gone.
And if I remember correctly, its because his wife used the bill to buy a bottle of champagne.
You act like people are logical all the time. It’s not unheard of that even reasonably intelligent people have killed for any number of crazy reasons.
I don’t remember that – it’s been a while- but what I recall is that at the end of the book their kid gets permanent brain damage from slipping at the pool or something. Definitely remember the “man, this shit was gratuitous” feeling.
The other big difference in the bookA SPOILER PLANis how Hank kills off Jacob much earlier on. And instead of Jacob’s horrible acceptance in the movie, he is not ready to go at all in the book and dies with hate for Hank in his eyes, it is dark stuff. And then you get the convenience store massacre! Fun times.
This movie is absolutely heartbreaking, but it’s so good. I keep hoping it will wind up in the Criterion Collection or something to finally get the recognition it deserves.
And you gotta love that eerie dissonant Danny Elfman soundtrack too! Hard to believe that one man did the Simpsons and Rugrats themes, the Beetlejuice, Mars Attacks, and MIB soundtracks, all the music in The Sims videogames, on top of a full 80’s New Wave rock career.Plus he does the singing voice of a bunch of the townspeople in Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride!
great movie, great book.“A Simple Plan sees its small town as an inescapable trap, in which no one ever flies away but only crashes.” i was in an acting class once where we read scenes from wilder’s “our town” keeping in mind not the usual endearing feelings for comfy, old-fashioned small town life but rather a gothic horror of never being able to escape a smothering town of horrible people. the teacher kept whispering, “it’s our town, emily, our town” randomly during scenes with the sweet emily webb. it was nicely chilling.
This is one of those great movies that I love, but have never sought out to watch it again. I think I last watched it about 15 years ago because it was on HBO. But that ending is so bleak, I’ve never actively decided “Hey, maybe I’ll watch A Simple Plan tonight.” I know I should, but damn.
I absolutely feel you. Brilliantly made film, really takes you into the lives of the characters, but that ending is a real kick in the balls, and as much as I lovethe movie, it’s jarring enough that it often dissuades me from rewatching whenever i come across it.
I taught this film on and off for years, and it never failed to move the students who were disarmed by Billy Bob’s performance, in particular.Raimi’s use of shallow focus to highlight the lurking danger at the margins of the frame is really excellent, as is the fox/hen house motif and a cameo towards the end of the film, of a sinister Gary Cole.So much to appreciate about this gem of a film.
Cole showing up is so damn great. It’s believable for the characters to be suspicious but also think that he could also be on the level but I remember watching it and the minute I saw Cole’s grim face thinking “Oh shit, he’s evil, do something Paxton.” All kinds of tension just from the actor. EDIT: And a huge second on Thornton, of course. He has a lot of great performances but this might be his best.
Yeah, the acting—all around—is stunning.I’ve seen the film dozens of times, and the ending still gets me, esp. the last convo between the brothers.And Gary Cole? He’s good in absolutely everything he’s in. Now I want someone to make me a Gary Cole tshirt of some kind. ]I wish Etsy will had the send-out-a-request-and-see-what-kind-of-bids you get. I got some great jewelry, a fabulous purse, a couple of hats and some artwork—all through the request system at Etsy (damn, why can’t I remember what the system was called?)
This is technically a Gary Cole t-shirt, in that he’s wearing it, and it’s pretty boss: https://www.tshirtsonscreen.com/talladega-nights-the-ballad-of-ricky-bobby-coors/
LOL.
And, Gary Cole is so sinister. When he shows up, you just know it’s going to be bad.
Can we cool it with the newsletter notification? I shouldn’t get it on the main page and again on the first article I click on.
But do you know about the newsletter? Do you want to click here and sign up for it?
I hope they enjoy how many request they have from [email protected]
Thanks a lot, Noel. Now I’m missing Bill Paxton again.
I rewatched Streets of Fire the other night and was happy to see his goony ass there, but yeah, it made me sad too. I think he was a hugely underrated actor, you have his 80s goofery but then a performance like this, and also stuff like the dad in Haywire, his delivery of “I haven’t shut my eyes since you were born” is as far away from “Game over man! Game over!” as you can get and is just as emphatic and true in its own way. He still had so many great performances to give.
Paxton reminds me of that old college buddy that you catch up with once in a while. He knows how to party and toss ‘em back. When you start to talk about how hard it is to balance your work and family life, he’s right there with a hand on your shoulder telling you that you’ll get through it. And please tell me that you’ve seen ‘Frailty’.
Oh man, Frailty is something else. I’m not quite sure it works, but I am sure that what does work would not work at all without Paxton setting it up. A very uncomfortable movie, I wish he had the chance to make more.
It must have been seeing this article subconsciously yesterday that got me randomly thinking of Bill Paxton and how much of a bummer it is that he is gone. Oddly enough I was thinking of Bridget Fonda yesterday too. But that was because Nathan Rabin wrote about “It Could Happen to You” on his site the other day.
We all react when we hear a favorite performer passes, but I was legitimately sad to hear that he died. Everything that I read or saw about him as a person on screen or in interviews showed him to be a really great guy. I remember him being on the Late Late Show with Kilborn (I stopped flipping through channels when I saw Paxton). They flashed a still of him from ‘Weird Science’, and he just started shouting Chet’s lines with this giant smile on his face. How can you not just love a guy like that?
He did seem like a good guy. I remember now what made me think of him yesterday. I was cooking fish last night and I started singing “Fish Heads” by Barnes & Barnes. The video of which was a very early MTV staple and was directed and starred Mr. Paxton.
It was Billy Mumy’s band. I think they were good friends too. That video got a lot of play in the 80’s. SNL, MTV, USA Night Flights, and even Nickelodeon played it pretty often.
I looked up Barnes & Barnes yesterday and was surprised to see that Yeah, Bill Mumy was one of the Barnes’s. That song and video is such a strange, wonderful part of my childhood.
Whenever The Quick and the Dead is ever mentioned, my mind immediately races to how much Ace Hanlon does not make sense as a character. I mean, this guy basically gets by on a gimmick and a BS rep, right? He knows he’s not the real deal. So why would he ever go within 1000 miles of a contest full of people who are the real deal and who are all ready and waiting to kill him to move on?
Seems to me Hanlon had legit skills — his marksmanship was demonstrably fantastic. My take on him is that he was a braggart who believed his own bs and tried to intimidate his opponents with tall tales… but he had skills to back it up.There’s always a bigger fish though…
Saw this movie a while ago on recommendation. Remember the first thirty minutes were so bad in terms of decision making on the characters parts we groaned in unison at how dumb the characters were. The only other time I’ve turned off a movie because of this was Prometheus. Wish I could see what you guys see.
It’s been years since I even thought about this movie…but with Fargo blowing up right now and stuff like Ozarks/Breaking Bad how didn’t someone snag this for a TV adaptation?!
Probably for the same reason they haven’t done a Winter’s Bone tv series.
This is the one “Coen-esque” film you’ve covered so far which actually does belong in the same company as their work. And I would not have expected a movie like this from Raimi.
There are two types of people in this world: people who like this movie, and people who read the book and can’t understand how Raimi could fuck up an adaptation that would’ve been simple (and better) if he’d just followed the novel.
To be fair, Raimi picked this up a fair way down the production track at a major studio, so it’s not like he had a lot of creative room. And far from being an easy adaptation, Smith’s first script would have run to four and a half hours.
Billy Bob Thornton is such a prick I refuse to watch any movie he’s in anymore. All I remember about this one from seeing it years ago, though, is that he looks like he got a wig and some fake teeth for Halloween. I thought it was solid back in the day. Haven’t pondered it since then.
Gary Cole is in this for what, 10 minutes? I have not seen this film for 20 years, but I remember him being fucking scary as hell.
As a reply to my own comment, didn’t he get American Gothic after this film?
“Someone’s at the door.”
D’oh! Should’ve scrolled down, I just went off on how creepy Cole is above.
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This movie is outstanding and Paxton is outstanding in it. Paxton’s premature passing hit me like few other celebrity deaths ever have. As many terrific, unique performances as he had, I still felt he was criminally underused by Hollywood.
My connection to this film is that I once broke the light meter of its cinematographer, Alar Kivilo. And that’s no real connection at all!
So will Spies Like Us make it into this “Coenesque” series? Yuk Yuk.