Ambition and Ideology: Intertextual Clues to A Simple Plan's View of the American Dream (Critical Essay‪)‬

In the voice-over narration in the opening sequence of Sam Raimi's 1998 film, A Simple Plan, Bill Paxton, who plays protagonist Hank Mitchell, defines happiness for the American man: a wife who loves him, a good job, and friends and neighbors who respect him. Hank inherits this definition of the American dream from his father, a midwestern farmer driven to suicide when the American economy shifts, eliminating the possibility that family farmer can be a "good" job. Despite his father's fate, Hank, with a college degree and a job as the accountant for the local feed store, has managed to construct a life that not only provides him an adequate middle-class income but also ensures his comfortable place within his community. Married to his college sweetheart, a part-time librarian pregnant with their first child, Hank, the film makes clear from the beginning, has apparently succeeded where his father failed. Obviously, plot requires that Hank's status as a "happy" man be disturbed if a story is to emerge. Screenwriter Scott Smith, adapting his own first novel (A Simple Plan 1993), not only disturbs his protagonist's status quo, but, in the act of adaptation, also alters his original conception of both characters and plot. One consequence of the changes he makes from novel to film is the underscoring of the story's deep intertextual roots. Although Richard Schickel links the film to Robert Frost's poem "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and a number of reviewers make note of its similarities to the Coen brothers' Fargo, as well as to such classic films as John Huston's Treasure of the Sierra Madre and Stanley Kubrick's The Killing (1), it is through even deeper intertextual roots that Smith and Raimi reveal their complicated ideological statement regarding the state of the American dream at the end of the twentieth century.