A Simple Plan (1998)

Put this next to Fargo and the pairing does most of the work. Same snow, same flat rural quiet, same ordinary people and a bag of money, and a completely different temperature. Fargo has a good person at the centre of it. A Simple Plan does not, and that is the whole difference. Hank is decent, thoughtful, educated and reasonable, and he does something monstrous roughly every twenty minutes for the best available reason each time.

The film is built as a chain of small logical steps. They should not keep the money, but nobody is looking for it. They should tell someone, but who. Lou knows, so Lou needs handling. Someone saw, so that needs handling. At no point does anyone make a decision that seems mad in the moment, and the destination is total. That structure is why it stays with people. You can see yourself agreeing to step one.

It is also the best work Bill Paxton and Billy Bob Thornton ever did. Thornton plays Jacob as slow, lonely and far more morally awake than his clever brother, and the scene where he talks about a girl who once pretended to like him is the saddest thing in this entire twelve week run. Sam Raimi, of all people, directs the whole thing with total restraint and no visible style at all.

Hank narrates the film and his narration is the tell. He explains and justifies constantly, always calmly, always reasonably. The film is told by a man building the case for himself while he does it, and you slowly realise the person he is arguing with is himself.

Sarah is the quiet engine of the second half. She starts as the sensible pregnant wife telling Hank to give it back, and once she has done the arithmetic she becomes the most ruthless strategist in the picture. Bridget Fonda plays the shift so gradually you cannot point to where it happened, which is the point.

The Coen connection is real and worth knowing. Sam Raimi and the Coens have worked together since the beginning, they co-wrote Crimewave, Raimi helped on Hudsucker Proxy, and the Coens were briefly attached to direct this. It is a Raimi film with Coen DNA, and comparing how the two handle the same setup is a genuinely interesting conversation.

The ending is the cruellest thing in the run. Everything is lost, everyone is dead or ruined, and the money turns out to have been unusable from the start. They destroyed every good thing in their lives for something that was never going to work. Then Hank burns it, and his narration keeps going, still reasonable.