A Simple Plan: A

We have all, in times of desparation or boredom or lack of anything to watch on television, entertained the thought of winning the lottery. "What would we buy?" we ask ourselves and each other, turning the illusion of money into a cathartic session of day-dreaming. And yet imagine if on one quiet snowy afternoon, three people stumbled across the quintissential lottery: 4$ million dollars in a snow-covered plane (complete with rotting dead body and vicious pack of crows). Can you dream up the troubles a group of people would face when in possession of riches? The sterling, white-knuckle tense answer is: neither can they. A Simple Plan, directed by Sam Raimi and written by Scott Smith (who wrote the book on which it is based), views its four central characters - Hank (Bill Paxton), Jacob (Billy Bob Thorton), Sarah (Bridget Fonda), and Lou (Brent Briscoe) - through a prism of morally complex curiousity; in effect, the sickening pull of the film is watch and wonder at just how far, and how far down, these men (and their wives, as in the case of Hank's spouse, Sarah) are willing to go to protect their money. Instead of the usual cat versus mouse (where we as an audience are pre-programmed to jack into the psyches of a predetermined "good guy") we get the far more uncertain (and in that uncertainty, bold energy and skill) premise of man versus morality; the age-old question of at which point does the buck stop?

To Lou, it doesn't. Showing up not days after having secured the money with Hank - since they've all agreed to wait it out 'till Spring before dividing up the cash - he wastes no time in revealing himself to Hank (his grand revelation has something to do with a more macabre aspect of their scheme and much more with Hank's guilt-complex), to which Hank responds with a devious plan of his own...all leading to one of many spasmic, anxious, bouts of violence, perfectly contained in the gothic-chamber vision of a quiet Northern town. The scenes surrounding the Lou against Hank scenario, just the first of many unanticipated turns, are great when viewed first-hand, for the first time, but become near genius in retrospect. See, the cinematic thrust of A Simple Plan - the thing that renders watching and siding with these "criminals" such compulsive, shivering delight - is in the way Smith's script trains our eyes on the small details of relationships and then lets us watch those same tweaks and hair-pin fractures erupt and explode. Billy Bob Thorton's performance is the perfect example. His character, Jacob, begins as the naieve counter-part to Hank. But as the film goes on, bodies, blood, and rationalizations piling up, he morphs before our very eyes. Part of this is due to Thorton's grand, unasuming performance but the greater portion of credit goes to the way the film sets up his relationships with women, his brother, and his friends so as to ensnare us in a web of lies, deceit, and blood as complex as his is.

As crime thrillers go, Plan may have a dated premise darting around its edges but the steely, surreal, elegant manner in which it is brought off eleminates all doubt that this isn't one heck of an original invention. But who would have expected any less from novelist-turned-screenwriter Smith? His two books, this film's source material and The Ruins, are famous for their lacerating psychological clarity and dark anti-climaxes, both of which A Simple Plan has in spades. The most deviously shocking moment of mental relapse occurs early on when Sarah, first realizing the money that has quite literally dropped into her lap, throws her high-horse moral posturing to the dogs with a split-second laugh of the coldest, most piercing, most intense insanity. Pretty soon after that she's become yet another piece of the puzzle; another scheming, ambitious piece. The puzzle they all eventually form is right up there with the most bleak of Smith's (and probably Raimi's) work; suffice to say the Oscar nod he got for the work he put out in adapting his own work was quiet well deserved.

So too was the nod for Billy Bob Thorton, and even more deserved (but even less espoused) were kudos for the raw, stylistically violent, clockwork cool direction from Sam Raimi. Now famous as the schlocky writer-director of the mega-huge-ultimate Spider-Man franchise, he once enjoyed the spotlight as creator of the Evil Dead films. Somewhere in between there though - from indie to infamous - he ascended ever so briefly as a very mature, very talented filmmaker. The cast around him, and the film around them, blossoms in response, flowering into a treat for cinephiles and bibliophiles (for who among the literary crowd won't bodily respond to the verbal skill at work here, from characterization to dialogue exchanges, in a typically visually-saturated form?) alike; a taunt, lean master class in the art of spellbinding and suprising your audience...or in a word, thrilling them.