After a sweet yet socially-stunted young man meets a free-spirited girl, he questions the ways of his rather absurd, often lethal, cult-like family, rethinking all he’s ever known, and challenging his clan.

SYNOPSIS:

The Problem with Plums, a feature screenplay synopsis

By Thom Reese

Logline:

After a sweet yet socially-stunted young man meets a free-spirited girl, he questions the ways of his rather absurd, often lethal, cult-like family, rethinking all he’s ever known, and challenging his clan.

Many people see the Hawkins family as narrow-minded, ultra-secretive, rigid, fundamentally peculiar, inbred fossils. Gerald Hawkins thinks of them as relations. In truth, they have the rather problematic tradition of killing one another in what they consider to be creative loving ways: strangulation by jump rope, poisoned plum, and trampled by an angry mob of girl scouts are but a few examples. Having been raised in this environment, Gerald finds this perfectly acceptable until he meets the free-spirited Heather and begins to rethink some of the more extreme practices of his rather bizarre clan.

Gerald’s father is the family patriarch and, as the Hawkins fortunes have taken a rather drastic dive during his reign, Gerald’s ambitious older brother, Alcott, questions their father’s competence. Gerald and Heather begin dating, having a bit of back and forth, forth and back, and whatnot with their mismatched relationship largely due to Heather’s growing curiosity about the peculiarities of Gerald’s family. Meanwhile, Gerald’s sister, Maggie, forces him to promise that if he learns that someone intends to send her to Fiji, he will do it first. Now, in Hawkins lingo, Fiji has nothing to do with sandy beaches and tropical resorts but is a rather innocuous code for being killed by a well-intended loved one. Gerald does not want to send Maggie to Fiji.

In a patently antisocial power bid, Alcott kills their father and takes the role of patriarch, becoming a bit of an aristocratic thug. His scheme for righting the family finances is to initiate as many deaths as possible in order to collect life insurance monies. As such, he soon instructs Gerald to kill their mother. Gerald, who by this point is questioning all things Hawkins, must now decide if he will commit to the family ways or turn from all he has ever known. Being rather goodhearted, he refuses to kill his mother, setting him at odds with Alcott who already has a history of trying to kill him with poison plums.

Gerald soon learns that a sulky, rather pimply cousin has plans to do away with Maggie. His solution: fake Maggie’s death. Alcott, who considers Heather to be a most troublesome influence on Gerald, decides to tell her about the family’s murderous tradition, throwing in the inaccurate tidbit that Gerald has killed Maggie. Heather is, of course, put out by this horrific news and confronts Gerald who confirms the tradition. But Heather storms away and out of his life before he is unable to communicate the fact that he defied his family ways, thus saving Maggie.

As his world spins out of control, Gerald decides he has had enough. He drugs Alcott with plum wine, faking his death, and declares himself the new patriarch. (Alcott awakes in a Fiji resort, alive and well.) Assembling the family, Gerald renounces the murderous tradition declaring it forbidden. Surprisingly, there are very few critics of the edict. Maggie cheerfully informs Heather that she’s alive and that Gerald has saved the family from their own longstanding foolishness. Heather reconnects with Gerald and they decide to take off for distant shores - just so long as it is nowhere near Fiji.

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