I am certain that I saw A Simple Plan before, but wasn’t a fan because it felt like a Fargo ripoff with a dash of Woody Allen’s Crimes & Misdemeanors meets Of Mice and Men, but I forgot enough of the movie to give it another chance for two reasons: Billy Bob Thornton and Sam Raimi. I’m glad that I did. I once heard that all art focuses on a limited number of subjects: before and after the fall (original sin), heaven and hell. A Simple Plan is definitely an after the fall movie.
A Simple Plan starts with narration and scenes of fallen nature. A fox staring into the hen house makes several appearances that takes the main character down the wrong path and if you look carefully, ends up dead and stuffed on a local barber’s window sill despite living in a nature preserve where hunting is not permitted. Hank, an upstanding local expecting his first child with his happy, librarian wife visits his dad’s grave with his homely, unemployed brother, Jacob, and Lou, Jacob’s loutish friend, i.e. people that Hank probably would not associate with if Jacob wasn’t family and Lou wasn’t tagging along. The friend reciprocates his disdain by ridiculing Hank’s manners and manliness. Jacob isn’t the brightest bulb in the bunch, but he is shocked by Jacob’s lack of emotional intelligence about their family history.
They find money and immediately fail John Quinones’ test of What Would You Do in a spectacular, cinematically contrived fashion with alacrity. Hank not only discovers that he is not better than the other two, but quite a bit worse regarding what he is capable of when the occasion arises. A Simple Man’s Hank is the everyman turned criminal albeit rationalizing every step of the way and explaining how his actions aren’t criminal or lack mens rea-a phenomenon more familiar to audiences with the release of Breaking Bad. (I haven’t seen Breaking Bad yet, but it is in the queue, and I know it is amazing.)
While A Simple Plan still feels a bit derivative after Fargo, A Simple Plan is a much more beautiful and poetically filmed movie. The early scenes involving Hank’s daily life seem filled with joy and happiness whereas when these scenes are reprised later in A Simple Plan, they seem closer to Sisyphus and a life sentence of hard labor, particularly the wife whose life behind bars are framed by hard cover books. The constant, silent presence of a murder of crows grows more sinister as the birds begin to fight amongst themselves. The brief, but perfectly legible newspaper article reveals the money’s origin story: two brothers who are responsible for six murders. “All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.”
A Simple Plan is a proverbial masterpiece although it consists of a series of implausible situations that could only happen in movies. A Simple Plan recommends to its audience to be content and stay on the narrow path otherwise the other path at worst will lead to death and at best a life of misery and drudgery.