Triple indemnity

Another of the more recent movies -- well this one "only" about two dozen years old -- that I had the chance to record during one of the free preview weekends was A Simple Plan. It's going to be on the Cinemax family of channels multiple times over the next couple of weeks, starting with tomorrow (May 9) at 12:24 PM on Cinemax (and three hours later if you only have the west coast feed).

In a small town in central Minnesota, it's the festive season between Christmas and New Years. Hank Mitchell (Bill Paxton) works for the local feed mill, keeping the books. It's not exactly the most remunerative job, but it pays the bills and has enabled him to have a wife Sarah (Bridget Fonda) and support a baby on the way, at least with the help of Sarah's job as the town librarian. Unfortunately, the rest of his life isn't the greatest, as his now-deceased parents lost the family farm, and his brother Jacob (Billy Bob Thornton) has some sort of learning disability that has left him working odd jobs and being mostly dependent on welfare.

Worse for Jacob is that he's gotten in with the wrong crowd, at least in that his best friend is the town drunk, Lou Chambers (Brent Briscoe), who is basically living -- if you can call it that -- as the kept husband of his wife. Jacob and Lou stop by Hank's house and pick him up for a joyride in Jacob's beat-up pick-up truck.

While on that joyride, they see what looks like a fox having caught a hen from the henhouse running off into the woods. So they get out and chase after it. What they find instead is an airplane that crashed fairly recently, or at least recently enough that it's not completely buried in snow. Inside the plane, they find a dead pilot -- and a bag containing cash. Lots of cash, bundled together in groups of $100 bills with each bundle being $10,000. Ultimately, on counting out the money, they discover it comes to $4.4 million.

Hank's first thought is a sensible one: notify the authorities, because certainly someone is going to be looking for the plane, as well as the missing money. Jacob isn't so certain, and Lou is even more adamant about not doing that, because, frankly, he needs the money. Now, of course, there's the question of what everybody is going to think if these three guys suddenly show up with a bunch of money. But as it seems fairly obvious that Lou and Jacob would come back for the money anyway, Hank agrees that they'll keep the money at his house for safekeeping, at least until the spring when the snow melts and the plane will be found. If anybody wonders about the missing cash, he can burn it at that point.

That's big mistake number 1, as Lou is going to get insanely jealous over the course of the winter, seeing as after all he really needs the money while Hank and his wife have to this point able to make a pleasant if modest life for themselves. Lou will probably be able to convince Jacob to take his side, as Jacob could use the cash to get the family farm back, which is what Jacob would most like to do. Mistake number 2 involves Hank telling Sarah, although to be fair, Sarah probably would have found out from Jacob anyway. Sarah winds up being just as jealous and desirous of the money as Jacob and Lou.

Worse, her ideas to Hank as to what to do always seem to turn out to be the wrong ones. When she suggests Hank put some of the money back so there will be less suspicion once the plane is found -- after all, who would pass over a half million dollars in a downed plane? -- Hank and Jacob are spotted about to head out to the plane and Jacob causes a farmer's death. So now they'll all be up for murder. And it's only going to get worse before the story ends.

A Simple Plan is a well-enough made movie, telling a good morality tale about the dangers of greed and dishonesty. Billy Bob Thornton is excellent as Jacob, and earned an Oscar nomination. Bridget Fonda is pretty good tooonce she starts getting jealous herself. Briscoe has the unenviable task of playing the least sympathetic character, and Paxton is good as the moral center of the film. I did, however, find one thing that seemed to be a gaping plot hole regarding the feds getting involved in the search for the plane, although I won't give that away.

Despite that flaw, A Simple Plan is certainly a movie worth watching if you haven't seen it before.