by Rich Elias, Jan 21, 1999

• Rated R
• 4 Stars

Hank's the brother who made it. He's an accountant in a feed store with a wife and a baby on the way. Jacob is a slow-witted loser. No job. No wife. Just a beat-up pickup truck, a dog (male) he calls Mary Beth, and Lou, a drunk, his only friend. The novel follows these three after Hank decides that the only way they can keep the money is to hide it for six months to see if anyone is looking for it. If not, they'll split it and leave town. If somebody comes looking, Hank will just burn it.

Part of the genius of Smith's story is that it shows what happens when the prospect of instant wealth corrupts the soul. That's the sorry, tragic path his story traces. Without spending a dime of their ill-gotten gains, Hank and his wife Sarah, Jacob, and Lou go to hell in their own way. Hank's transformation is the most dramatic. His ordered, middle-class life does not keep him from using violence to maintain control over Lou, his brother, and their situation. In fact, Smith makes us understand that this need for control is what got Hank beyond his sorry family history in the first place. With four million dollars on the line, that same need takes a dark turn. Since Hank is the narrator of Smith's novel, there's the added shock of hearing the character explain, calmly and quietly, how he turns into a monster.

The screenplay was adapted by Smith and directed by Sam Raimi, best known for his "Evil Dead" films and "Darkman." This is probably the most fertile combination of talents in this genre since "Silence of the Lambs." Bill Paxton stars as Hank Mitchell, giving the character a face which is on the border between ordinary and handsome. Paxton remains an actor from whom you expect more than he delivers. His challenge in "A Simple Plan" is to anchor Hank so that you care what happens as the money corrodes him. But Paxton ("Twister") isn't convincing enough on screen.

Billy Bob Thornton, as Jacob, more than compensates. Jacob knows he has nothing and will not ever get beyond his foul apartment, his pickup, and friends like Lou. That is Jacob's life. His glasses are held together by a piece of duct tape and his pickup has a plastic sheet slapping in the wind instead of glass. But these are artifacts intended to convince us a character is real. It's Thornton's acting that makes Jacob real.

Raimi works from the book in establishing the setting. Smith located his story in northern Ohio (Smith is from Sylvania) in mid-winter. Isolation, snow, and small-town trust all figure in the novel and find their way on screen in Raimi's rendition, which effectively uses vast stretches of empty whiteness to define these men and their predicament. Back in town, everybody is first name: a Hank, a Jacob, a Carl (the sheriff). All of this rings true. It's the kind of day by day familiarity we expect.

But Smith and Raimi make major changes from Smith's novel, and I'd like to discuss these in detail. Please note: what follows in this review may spoil the movie for viewers who don't know the book, so you may want to stop reading at this point.

"A Simple Plan" might as well be a textbook example of how to adapt a novel. The book is a first-person account, with Hank telling us what happened. Normally, novels which depend on our interest in the narrator to keep us interested don't translate well on screen. Novelist-screenwriter Larry McMurtry, in "FilmFlam" said as much. But "A Simple Plan," the movie, is an exception.

The reason is that changes in the story arise from the different needs of a movie versus a book. Raimi and Smith rework the novel to transform the climax of the story. Gone is a long, violent episode in a liquor story when Hank recovers a possibly marked bill. In its place is an Act III in which Jacob realizes his doom.

I've read Smith's novel twice and respect it. But "A Simple Plan," the movie, shows how to transform a story from one medium, a novel, to another, a movie. Most of the changes hit home because Smith and (I expect) Raimi thought through the problem of how to transform a page-turner of a book into an omigod movie.

A good book, and now a good movie -- two compelling but very different experiences, both highly recommended.