Money ruins everything: 'A Simple Plan' turns 25

Looking back at the other morally complex thriller from the late ‘90s that was set in the snows of Minnesota

It’s a major well-established cliche of movies that if a character finds a bag with a bunch of money in it, things seldom turn out well. Usually, it’s fairly straightforward, in that the person whose money it was, usually a dangerous criminal, comes after them. 

Sam Raimi’s A Simple Plan, which arrived in theaters in December of 1998 — 25 years ago this week – starts that way, but goes in a different direction than most films of its kind. 

A Simple Plan — written by Scott B. Smith, adapting his novel — is set in winter, in a small town somewhere in rural Minnesota- a rural enough place that a plane could crash there without anyone noticing. That’s exactly what happens, and that plane in the middle of the woods happened to have over $4 million, of mysterious provenance, aboard, along with the dead body of a pilot. 

The men who discover the money are Hank (Bill Paxton), his older brother Jacob (Billy Bob Thornton), and Jacob’s friend Lou (Brent Briscoe). Hank is a college-educated accountant with a wife (Bridget Fonda) and a baby on the way, Jacob has none of that, and Lou is even more of a ne’er-do-well. 

Rather than report or return the money, they decide to keep it. And they know it’s the middle of winter in Minnesota and no one will find the plane until the snow melts. So they agree — in the “Simple Plan” of the title — that Hank will hold the money, none of them will mention it to anyone, and they’ll split the money in the spring. 

Unsurprisingly, nothing goes according to plan. While such movies almost always result in the owners of the money coming after it, A Simple Plan is all about them hurting each other. These guys don’t know the first thing about how to hide millions, and it shows, as they keep making mistakes, some of which result in a growing pile of dead bodies and even more scrambling and lying. Paxton’s wife, meanwhile, shows heretofore unseen Lady Macbeth-like traits. 

But even worse than that, for the men, the presence of the money leads to the repeated surfacing of various resentments among the three of them- including one scene, like every other movie in the 1990s, in which they all point guns at each another at once. 

The third act is extremely tense, as the brothers go into the woods with a man who is either an FBI agent or the criminal whose money it is. Then, a sad note and finally a gut punch.

A Simple Plan has quite a lot in common with Joel and Ethan Coen’s Fargo, which came out two and a half years earlier. Both are set in Minnesota, featuring endless shots of snow on the ground. Both are about ugly human behavior in the heartland, including people doing things they shouldn’t do for “a little bit of money” (though in A Simple Plan’s case, it’s more like a LOT of money.) Beyond that, A Simple Plan’s main conceit — a bunch of non-criminals having to act like criminals, and getting in over their heads while doing so — is also that of about a half-dozen different Coen movies.

Both films are also in love with the long shot of a dead body darkening the white snow and Raimi, a longtime friend and collaborator of the Coens, is said to have gotten pointers from them on how to shoot snow. 

However, there are key differences as well. Fargo was all about the contrast between the veneer of folksiness and the greed and murders; A Simple Plan dispenses with the folksy part altogether. Also, no character sounds particularly like they’re from the Upper Midwest with Thornton, in particular, not doing much to try to hide his Southern-ness (the film was shot over the border in Wisconsin.) 

Also, in both films, you’d think tracks in the snow would provide more evidence of crimes than they do. 

The late Paxton gives one of his best turns in the film, while Thornton is right there with him, making the film in that period post-Sling Blade when he was getting cast in absolutely everything. The film is also full of small performances from great characters, like Chelcie Ross, Becky Ann Baker, and Gary Cole. 

The film came at an odd time in Raimi’s career- it was after all of his Evil Dead movies, and came between The Quick and the Dead and For the Love of the Game, shortly before he began making Spider-man films. 

A Simple Plan got great reviews but only did moderately well at the box office. It got two Oscar nominations — Smith for screenplay and Thornton for acting – but won neither. 

Maybe someday someone will make a movie in which the characters find a bag with millions of dollars, the owners of the money never resurface, the people with the money never fight over it, and nothing else bad happens. But that’s not this.

I loved A Simple Plan when I first saw it, although I never watched it again until I did a rewatch before I wrote this. I remember being so blown away that I named it the best film of 1998 in my college newspaper column, and while I still greatly admire the picture, that was recency bias and it’s not better than Saving Private Ryan. But the film, which is available to stream on Paramount+, is a marvel, the other great Minnesota snow movie from the end of the 1990s.