Editorial: Sam Raimi Needs To Make More Films Like A Simple Plan (1998)

When I reviewed Sam Raimi’s excellent The Quick and The Dead, I knew I’d scratched an itch that was not going to subside for a while. Seeing a director like him offer his box of tricks to a genre and setting that wouldn’t normally go with his style yielded fantastic results, and let the world know that he can do a lot more than just film Bruce Campbell punching demons and/or himself. With that said, it’s still a very flashy movie. It’s got his fingerprints all over it, with the whip-pan camera movements, the rich colours, and a lot of dynamic shots. We still don’t really know if Raimi can pull himself back from these visual trademarks while still making it known to the audience that they’re watching a Sam Raimi movie.

The 1998 thriller A Simple Plan is exactly the film that Raimi needed to make. It’s a highly accomplished two hours of well-acted and well-directed tension, and is one of the more high-brow works in his varied filmography. To be fair, when your main forte at this point is astoundingly nerdy slapstick horror films, that’s not saying much. However, A Simple Plan still stands out in many ways, the main reason being that it’s the first example of a Sam Raimi directorial effort that tips the balance away from style in favour of story, and substance.

Raimi came into the project relatively last-minute. The script had been passed around many hands and actors for years prior, with Ben Stiller and John Boorman both set to direct and Nicholas Cage set to star at various points during the long production, but when Raimi was brought on at the eleventh hour he saw himself an opportunity to do something different from his earlier works, less visually loaded and more grounded in reality and character work. Of course this is a good intention but without a good script that’s all it is – an intention.

Luckily, A Simple Plan has a terrifically-plotted and very involving narrative that goes down some very dark and disturbing pathways without ever feeling cheap, and never loses sight of its wonderful cast of characters, fronted by the late Bill Paxton as Hank Mitchell.

There’s many thriller stories where a seemingly level-headed and moral human being pushes their limits and ends up being driven mad by their own actions. Famous examples include, of course, Jack Torrance in The Shining. However, with that character Jack Nicholson was provoked into a deliberately eccentric and off-the-wall performance by Kubrick. What makes Paxton shine in this role is how ‘normal’ he is – a well-meaning everyman, expecting a child with his wife, who doesn’t know quite what to do when he and his friends stumble across a crashed plane loaded with money. Ah yes, the classic tale of morality. Do you keep this money of unknown origin? What do you do with it? What lengths will you go to to keep it?

Paxton is really great here, and it’s refreshing to see Raimi direct characters that feel fleshed-out and real after three Evil Dead movies starring fun caricatures. Even The Quick and The Dead’s human characters feel somewhat detached from reality. A Simple Plan’s mundanity makes the building tension and the unravelling of our protagonist’s moral code all the more riveting.

Seeing a director like Raimi tackle themes like this is thrilling. After all, as I have repeatedly alluded to, there’s very little rhyme or reason as to why any of the weird things in Evil Dead happen. It’s much easier to get inside the head of Bill Paxton’s lead than it is Ash Williams, that’s for sure.

But more importantly, it proves that Raimi is a supremely confident storyteller. He chooses to let his actors act without a lot of his usual camera tricks and whip-pans, and even when there’s the odd bit of visual trickery, the tension present in the script results in it feeling way more visceral. There’s weight to the direction here, with Raimi selling each and every shot.

However, my main aim of talking about this film isn’t necessarily to ‘review’ it. Yes, I have discussed all of the elements I like here but, much like when I covered The Quick and The Dead, I want to look at this less as a standard film, rather as a key work in Sam Raimi’s varied filmography. And I think A Simple Plan is easily the most underrated work in his entire catalogue. This is a side to Raimi that we haven’t seen before, likewise it’s a side to Raimi that we haven’t seen since.

In the early 21st century, Sam Raimi made a massive first impression in the field of blockbuster cinema with the Spiderman trilogy, the first of which I just rewatched recently. I am considering reviewing these as well, if only so I can defend my enjoyment of Spiderman 3, but for a previously nerdy and boxed-in director like Raimi to suddenly be one of the leading faces of superhero cinema must have been a curveball to the original fans of his. Since this trilogy however, Raimi hasn’t quite managed to shake off the expectations that have followed him since that massive boost in popularity he found with those crowdpleasing projects.

After a brief return to his slapstick horror roots with the very fun Drag Me To Hell, he delivered the somewhat middling Oz The Great & Powerful, a Disney-produced Wizard Of Oz prequel that seemingly tired him out since he didn’t make another movie for nearly a decade. Instead he has produced movies for an awful lot of uncoming talent. And when he did come back, it was to help spruce up one of Marvel’s many iffy recent projects, Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness, a film he directs the hell out of as an attempt to distract from its glaring script problems.

I say all that because I think he took the wrong lessons from directing A Simple Plan. The Quick & The Dead got mixed reviews at the time and may have knocked his confidence, but A Simple Plan was a critical darling despite a lacklustre box-office showing, proving that his genre experimentation can work. As a result, he shot for the stars, with not one but three of his own superhero movies, films that are great in their own right but are appealing to the masses. A playground much too big for his eccentricity.

Because of incessant issues financing his work and studio interference, Raimi career has been unable to seperate his experimentation from broad studio appeal. And while I don’t think he’s necessarily diluted his talents, he isn’t stretching himself far enough. I want him to scale back, and choose projects not because of the budget or the ambition, but because of the screenplays, the talent behind them and, more importantly, the risks he might need to take. His stabs at superhero films were initially risks but he can now direct them in his sleep. A Simple Plan is the kind of stripped-back, enthralling and exciting story he could be telling with his directing chops. I want to see what other weird projects he’s got on the backburner, because if they’re anything like A Simple Plan, then colour me intrigued.

Alex’s Archive – A Simple Plan