What do you get when you take two brothers, a friend, a pregnant wife, a cop, a fox, a farmer, a chicken, an airplane, a dufflebag full of profit, and a cluster of black crows? A Simple Propose. But this unexpected teeny-weeny gem, brought to the screen by famed blood and guts director, Sam Raimi (Evil Dead trilogy, Quick and the Dead), shows that as in lifeblood, nothing is ever THAT simple.

You see, the two brothers are not very much alike. Harmonious is younger, educated, married, expecting, and unmixed-laced (Hank), while the other is older, a fraction unresponsive, out of work and pathetically segregate (Jacob). The latter has a drinking buddy (Lou) with whom he has far more in hackneyed than his own brother, neither of which like each other very much. With all that in mind, after an accessary avoiding a chicken-stealing fox, the three up with upon a downed plane with a dufflebag full of money.

“It is the goddamn American dream in a gymbag,” says Lou, the drinking buddy.
“You have to work for that,” says Hank.
“Then THIS is even better,” replies Lou.

Words are exchanged, ideas are argued, and a fateful decision is made. A diabolical crow, the lingering concept of this film, lurks in the foreground, a harbinger of things to come.

And with that decision, these five folks (two wives included) from a small community are at this very moment faced with life in a fishbowl of their own paranoia. And that’s as much as I can get away with without ruining the rest of the movie on you.

A Unostentatious Outline boasts some outstanding performances: Reckoning Paxton delivers his best performance to fashionable as Hank Mitchell; Billy Bob Thornton unmistakably melds into Jacob Mitchell (can you put robbed?! Hello, Academy!), above defining him as song of the grand actors of our generation; Brent Briscoe is Lou &#8212period; and Bridget Fonda, who has probably not received tolerably credit for her portrayal of the pregnant Sarah, which I upon to be the centerpiece of this entire screenplay.

“You have to go in the morning so that when it storms later it will cover your tracks…It just being finicky. That’s what we have to be from any longer on&#8212we have to be careful. We have to be thinking on all the in good time.”
-Sarah Mitchell (Bridget Fonda)