A vital plan: see A Simple Plan

What would you do for $4 million? Lie to your closest friends, break the law, betray your own brother, even kill? This is the premise of A Simple Plan, the Sam Raimi-directed and critically acclaimed drama that opens this Friday at the Apollo.

Bill Paxton plays Hank Mitchell, who along with his older brother Jacob (Billy Bob Thornton) and his brother's friend Lou (Brent Briscoe) discover a downed plane in the snowy deep woods on New Year's Eve. The plane contains a dead pilot and a duffel bag with over $4 million in cash.

Under Hank's insistence, the trio decides to keep the money safe until spring, and to split up the money and leave town if it is not claimed by the spring. Seemingly, A Simple Plan.

But matters become increasingly more complicated when Hank's wife Sarah (Bridget Fonda, both startlingly real and cold-bloodedly calculating) becomes a party to the scheme. Initially against the whole affair, her morality fails to triumph when she actually sees the money. Bit by bit, the situation begins to crumble with a crime committed, resolves and loyalties tested and paranoia ever-increasing.

The movie is a sometimes excruciating journey through the hearts and minds of ordinary people confronted with an extraordinary opportunity. Paxton's Hank, a grain salesman - the lone college-educated member of the group and one of few in the small town in which the film is set - is torn between morality and the chance to provide for his wife and their unborn child a life with comfort and without the everyday mundanity that their lives promise.

Paxton, whose long and successful career of character acting includes such diverse credits as Aliens, Boxing Helena, and Apollo 13, shines in perhaps his most impressive starring role to date. He is a man who at the same time knows what is right and what it is he must do to save himself, and these are often two very different things.

Thornton received nominations for Best Supporting Actor for the Academy Awards, Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild Awards. His character is one of a man who gets through life without any particular gifts, goals or opportunities. Not a smart man, he is just self-aware enough to realize the rather unfortunate hand life has dealt him - and in his life, he can play only with the cards he was dealt. Fonda, Briscoe and a host of other quality character actors round out the cast in this well-casted and honest portrayal of modern small-town life.

Raimi is a man whose talents have never been questioned, but who has often chosen to do projects off the beaten path rather than mainstream cinema. He may be best known for his cult classic Evil Dead series, but he also directed Darkman and produces the top two syndicated series on television, Hercules: the Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess.

His bleak vision of winter in the Midwest is just as effective as the Coen brothers' Fargo, but where Fargo was darkly comic, A Simple Plan is tragic, and the winter setting adds a dimension of gloom never explored in Fargo. Raimi uses no fancy camera techniques, no fast-and-furious editing (as were the hallmarks of much of his previous work) but allows the pace of the film to sustain itself.

The script, adapted by Scott B. Smith from his novel of the same name, is also up for an Academy Award, as well as Best Screenplay (Adaptation) from the National Board of Review. Smith paces the movie with movement that is constant but always subtle, and does an expert job of maintaining both authenticity in the characters and credulity in behavior.

Through a combination of superb acting, a terrific script and expert direction, Raimi's vision of just how bad good people can be more than acheives its goal. The audience is left thinking about the downside of human potential and of just how hopeless life can be for so many people. Whatever else it is, A Simple Plan is anything but simple.