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A
Simple Plan
dir. Sam Raimi
With the possible exception of the near-universal agreement that the film
is one of the year’s best, nothing is expressed about “A Simple
Plan” so often as disbelief that Sam Raimi had it in him to direct it.
Those that have scratched beneath the surface of Raimi’s giddy filigrees,
however, don’t find it difficult to believe at all. His oeuvre—”The
Evil Dead,” “Crimewave,” “Evil Dead 2,” “Darkman,”
“Army of Darkness,” “The Quick and the Dead”—have
more in common that their doom ‘n’ gloom titles; more still, in
fact, than the staggering, show-offy technical virtuosity for which Raimi
is associated. Admirably, the director invests all of his films with a solid
study of human nature.
Before you laugh that statement off with remembrances of the high slapstick
of “The Quick and the Dead” or the broken machospeak of Bruce Campbell
in “Army of Darkness,” think of the disinterest and contempt for
character exhibited in similar genre pieces of the past 15 years. Contrast
that with what the director draws out of his actors and captures in, say,
the Pink Elephant scene in “Darkman”—given, it’s ridiculous,
and given, it’s comic-book camp, but that makes the fact that it’s
effectively affective more impressive still. Admitted, it can’t be said
that the characters in Raimi’s films to date are memorable in and of
themselves, but that’s largely because Raimi has never worked with a
script of the requisite depth.
Until, of course, “A Simple Plan,” adapted from his own novel by
Scott B. Smith. In theme and quality, the movie is reminiscent of nothing
less than “Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” only transported from
remote deserts and mountains to backyards and the house down the road.
When three lifelong Delano, Minn., residents—Hank (Bill Paxton), his
brother Jacob (Billy Bob Thornton) and Jacob’s friend Lou (Brett Briscoe)—happen
across 4.4 million dollars in a snowy forest, they decide to retain it and,
if no one notices its absence come springtime, divvy it up three ways and
leave town. Smith and Raimi set the tone for the rest of the film wonderfully
in this discovery; Hank acknowledges the illegality of keeping it and initially
insists on notifying the authorities, but the money-simple arguments of his
companions cause him to waver. As they stare at the sports bag laden with
stacks of hundreds, you see all of them—particularly Hank, wed and an
expectant father, who knows that the money will allow his family a new start
in a community with more opportunites—relent to its seduction.
As soon as they choose to keep the money, it’s too late for them. Immediately,
they are confronted with a multitude of questions with only two possible answers—admit
their theft or engage in more wrongdoing. Their choice goes without saying;
they’re so given to greed that the ending, despite its many surprises,
seems in retrospect inevitable.
If the film were more melodramatic, it would be easier to dismiss the happenings
of the plot, these forced questions, as a unique case; that, under different
conditions, they could have taken the money and it would have been all right.
Not so, contend Raimi and Smith; the ill fortune falls too swiftly and heavily
to be anything so tidy as circumstance. The character condemn themselves through
their actions, and the movie metes out justice.
Raimi has surrendered his gonzo style for “A Simple Plan,” but retained
and even refined his graphic sense and knack for structure. It’s so expertly
handled that it’s hard to imagine much of the movie being directed by
anyone else. Equally impressive is his ability to solicit four career-defining
lead performances. Bridget Fonda, as Hank’s complicit wife, is magnificent
as a Lady Macbeth with sticktuitiveness; her scene when she is first given
her newborn son may be the movie’s most chilling. Briscoe brings complexity
to a character that a less understanding actor would have written off as one-note.
Thornton’s much-acclaimed turn as Jacob is a knockout; he layers this
difficult role with such subtlety, gravity and dignity that it nearly eclipses
his self-directed showcase in “Sling Blade.”
Paxton, however, is the movie’s center, and no one has taken such advantage
of his sensitive, emotive face as Raimi does here. Paxton appears in essentially
every scene, and he gives you a palpable sense of all the tangents that define
his descent. In some of the year’s most unappreciated acting, he presents
an astounding portrait of corruptible humanity—which is to say, humanity.
A Civil Action
dir. Steven Zaillian
Based on the true story of personal injury lawyer Jan Schlictmann, who sacrifices
everything to see justice done against two corporations he believes were responsible
for poisoning a small town’s drinking water and thereby instigating the
town’s tragically high number of leukemia deaths, “A Civil Action”
has all the earmarks of a work ready to drown in unchecked liberal-humanist
sentiment. Not helping its defense at all were the too-often-screened trailers,
with John Travolta (as Schlictmann) squeaking about doing “something
decent.”
Many in the movie industry make themselves feel better about their life’s
work by doing something decent—namely, releasing movies like “Guess
Who’s Coming to Dinner” and “Philadelphia,” with their
solemn pedantry and their uncomplicated ideas of right and wrong. Films in
this tradition are all about Hollywood exercising its self-imposed, self-righteous
mandate to enlighten us plain folk. It seems obvious, however, that spotlighting
significant issues is not license to tell bad stories and sell bad drama (although
if you disagree, you’ll love “Patch Adams”).
There’s no question that “A Civil Action” writer/director Steven
Zaillian (who last handled both chores on “Searching for Bobby Fischer”
and is best known as the screenwriter of such films as “Schindler’s
List”) succumbs to some easy, limply moralistic outs in his treatment
of this material. The corporate baddies, including Robert Duvall as a gregarious
shark, are entirely soulless and unsympathetic. The lawyers that choose not
to pursue the case—which, because of its up-front technical costs and
protracted proceedings, is monstrously expensive—are dismissed and never
considered again, including some who have become major supporting characters.
Such uninspired heavy-handedness often consigns films which feature it to
unredeemable pap.
But “A Civil Action” is still remarkable. In part, it’s because
it doesn’t take the mechanical, tearjerking, feel-good approach; the
story develops with the clumsiness of nonfiction, and doesn’t offer pat,
standard-issue resolutions. And, in part, it’s because the cast includes
Travolta, Duvall, Kathleen Quinlan, Tony Shalhoub, William H. Macy, Dan Hedaya,
John Lithgow and a host of others, including some relative unknowns as the
townsfolk, every one of whom delivers an assured performance under the guidance
of Zaillian.
Essentially, however, the basic satisfaction of “A Civil Action”
is that it’s such a well-made movie. Just about the least cinematic setting
is the courtroom; they all look effectively the same and inspire very formalized,
soliloquoy-driven speech. Since film is the medium of showing, all this telling
runs against its nature.
Zaillian succeeds by creating perhaps the best sustained dramatization of
the internal monologue in recent memory. The only voiceover is at the beginning
and the only titles are at the end; other than that, you’re closed off
from any direct access to the characters’ minds. Everything you know
about them comes about from their dialogue, which is very rarely expository,
and by their actions. Zaillian employs countless shorthands, not prettified
speeches, to communicate what his characters are thinking, inverting (as Robert
Towne did again with this year’s “Without Limits”) all conventional
wisdom about screenwriters as directors.
It would be better if his characters had more to think about, though, and
Schilctmann himself is a major problem. Though portrayed expertly by Travolta,
the character exists only a weird savior archetype. You see his finery and
his social grace at the film’s open, but once the story starts going,
he never sees any friends outside work, he never communicates with any family
he may have, he never attends to any social obligations, he never exhibits
any desires outside that for justice. Perhaps it’s a sign of changing
times: the fictional attorney/family man Atticus Finch of 1962’s “To
Kill a Mockingbird” was the synthesis of all of our best qualities while
the grounded-in-fact Schlictmann is humanism without humanity. Their attendant
movies make saints of them both.
The Faculty
dir. Robert Rodriguez
Dimension
Films
Two great versions of “Invasion on the Body Snatchers” have been
made (1956 and 1978), both uniquely fleshing out their sci-fi potboiler skeleton
about people being replaced by lookalike alien drones in their sleep.
The films are both evoked in spirit and invoked in name by “The Faculty,”
written by Kevin Williamson (“Scream,” “I Know What You Did
Last Summer”) and directed by Robert Rodriguez (“Desperado,”
“From Dusk Till Dawn”). The film does its share of reconfiguring
the particulars of the story—instead of intergalactic spores, intergalactic
pirahna-like paramecia; instead of getting you when you sleep, getting you
through a penetrative kiss to the ear—but makes its signature switch
by setting the story in high school, with the teachers first to be converted.
It’s the perfect milieu; the collective consciousness aliens are The
Big Clique, and to join, you have to obliterate your self.
On the strength of its talent and premise, “The Faculty” is potentially
great thriller with potentially effective social satire. It’s maddening,
then, that it’s as poor as it is.
The movie’s best synthesis of situation and tension comes about thus:
the only way each of our heroes can prove to one another that he or she is
not an extraterrestrial simulacrum is to take a hit of some stimulants that
dehydrate the aliens. Armed and progressively more wigged out, they try to
get one another to get high and, in so doing, risk uncovering an alien. Williamson’s
character sense and Rodriguez’s directorial acumen give the scene real
edge-of-your-seat value.
It’s a great reel, but it captures why “The Faculty” fails
on a thematic level. Behavioral conformity is the last thing that should pop
up in a “Body Snatchers” movie, and though this instance is odd
and unsettling, the pro-conformity idea keeps popping up throughout the movie.
Worst is the denouement, where the surviving kids are portrayed as having
graduated from misfits to members of the cool cadre. Everyone gets their rough
edges hewn off and gets along, with Tommy Hilfiger as the great equalizer.
This disappointing dilution might be offset if the thrills paid off, so it’s
unfortunate that they don’t far more often than they do. The kick to
any thriller is that its creators understand the expectations they’ve
created well enough to exploit them—suspense demands expectation. When
the floor starts to fall out from beneath “The Faculty,” however,
any expectations are thrown to the winds and without them, its surprises are
hollow and no fun. As its “big secrets” get revealed, your mind
races back through the movie for substantiating evidence—and there’s
none.
Most onerous is discovering that the aliens had the power to quash the resistance
at a number of points along the way, but instead they protract things and,
in so doing, allow the humans to find a way to stop the invasion. The aliens
are, in their own minds, benevolent because they’re replacing the whim-driven
and often petty human sprit with zombified amiability, but often throughout
the film, characters revealed to be aliens prank their human targets cruelly
and violently—the difference can’t be reasonably reconciled, and
a villain with impenetrable motivation is the worst kind.
Without a coherent thematic or narrative superstructure, then, the only last-ditch
grasp for entertainment remaining is the mechanical pleasures of good execution,
but still “The Faculty” stumbles. Too often, the movie weakly tries
to get a reaction through cheap, bump-into-another-character-at-a-tense-moment
scares, and it exhausts instead of electrifies. To his credit, Rodriguez does
come through with a handful of excellent set pieces that play to his strength—he’s
possibly the best of the action wunderkinds, and his ingenuity is admirable—but
it’s too little too late. In the parlance of its villains: unsatisfactory;
poor effort; needs improvement.
