Plot
The film opens as Vann Siegert (Owen Wilson) decides to turn left onto a road, striking out on a new path in life. His first stop is a bar, where he meets Casper (Sheryl Crow, in her first film appearance). They leave the bar together in his truck. Casper asks Vann to pull over at a rest stop to get high. After she shoots up, she balances her syringe on the open glove box, noticing a flask. She asks what is in it, and Vann answers that it is full of amaretto. After drinking it, she passes out. Vann carries her body into the bathroom and arranges it to look as if she overdosed.
While sleeping on the beach in his truck, Vann is awakened by a cop who tells him he has to get a room somewhere. The next day, he arrives at the home of Doug and Jane Durwin (Brian Cox and Mercedes Ruehl). He rents out the room of their missing daughter. Doug recommends he look for work at the post office, as they are hiring seasonal help for Christmas.
As he is tidying up, Vann passes out and daydreams that he is digging a grave. Detectives Blair and Graves (Dwight Yoakam and Dennis Haysbert) stand over him, asking taunting questions about his methods. Throughout the film, Vann has imaginary conversations/psychotic breaks with reality with the two detectives. Vann is shown retrieving a kit from under his car. It contains a poison, which he places in the flask and then fills with amaretto.
Doug takes Vann to a high school football game, where he meets a star athlete and his family. A few days later, Vann offers the boy a ride and murders him, burying his body on a beach. He explains in one of the many voice overs about his methods, that he never plans out his murders and he never commits any violence. His victims just go to sleep and do not wake up. Vann also reveals that the murder of the footballer broke two of his personal rules: Don't kill anyone you know, and don't kill anyone from your town.
Vann helps the town search for the missing athlete and even attends his memorial service. His ties to the community grow as he is given more responsibility at the post office. One of his co-workers, Ferrin (Janeane Garofalo), sheepishly pursues him. Doug drives Ferrin to the beach. The pair exchange an awkward hug, which betrays the difficulties Vann has with physical intimacy, despite his warm and outgoing personality with everyone he meets. The embrace occurs directly over the spot where Vann buried the high school footballer.
On Christmas Day, Vann goes to a diner and chooses another victim (Meg Foster). She invites him to her home, where he sees that she is a painter. Something about her work disturbs him and he flees. Vann returns to the diner and slips poison into the water of a man (Lew McCreary) eating alone. An autopsy reveals that the death was the result of a rare poison derived from tree bark fungus found in Oregon. The poison is then linked with the murder of Casper. The young athlete's body is found and also linked to the same poison. Vann knows that the police will eventually tie the murders to him. While looking in the mirror, he pulls hairs off his jacket and puts them in an envelope on which he writes 'FERRiN'.
Jane is found dead by a blow to the back of the head. The police suspect Doug, but Vann is worried that the increased scrutiny from another murder will lead the police to him. During a date with Ferrin, he tries to initiate sex by beating her. She is terrified, and Vann is mortified.
The next day, Vann is seen playing the piano – the tune "Ain't We Got Fun" – and Doug starts singing and dancing around the room. The police arrive and arrest Doug for the murder of Jane. Vann packs his things. Before he leaves town, he puts his postal uniform and the envelope with Ferrin's hair sample in a mailbox. The film ends as he drives on the highway, pursued by the same cop who stopped him on the beach. After taking a good look with her spotlight, she smiles at him and takes the right fork in the road while Vann takes the left. In a voice-over monologue prior to this scene, Vann vows to stop killing whenever he gets where he is going. However, Vann explains that he does not know where he is going.
Read more about this topic: The Minus Man
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“Morality for the novelist is expressed not so much in the choice of subject matter as in the plot of the narrative, which is perhaps why in our morally bewildered time novelists have often been timid about plot.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
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