Arlington Road (1999)

It's easy to understand why Arlington Road sat on the studio shelf for nearly a year. No, the film isn't awful; rather, it's an extremely edgy and ultimately bleak thriller that offers no clear-cut heroes or villains. In other words, Hollywood had no idea how to sell it. Director Mark Pellington's underrated directorial debut, Going All the Way, suffered the same fate, essentially because the filmmaker's presentation of suburban America often shifts dramatically within the same film. Characters are usually miserable and bordering on meltdown, no situation is straightforward, and things usually end badly. Arlington Road begins as an astute study of suburban paranoia. Michael Faraday (a face-pinched Jeff Bridges, who spends most of the film on the brink of tears) is a college professor who teaches American history courses on terrorism. He's been a conspiracy freak since his wife, an FBI agent, was killed during a botched raid that feels like a thinly fictionalized reference to the Waco tragedy. After saving the life of his next-door neighbor's child, he initially befriends the family (Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack), but soon believes the husband is a terrorist. The first half of the film mocks Faraday: he has no real evidence and is not the most stable of protagonists. Despite the fact that it was government paranoia that got his wife killed, Faraday repeats the same type of behavior. Pellington shifts gears in the second half, however, and for awhile, it seems that the film has simultaneously sunk into a cheap, high-octane brand of Hollywood entertainment and undermined its own point. Arlington Road, though, possesses a stunning ending that's a real gut punch, one that may leave you needing a second viewing to catch all of its smartly executed setup. --Dave McCoy Amazon.com

Lousy, no-thrills, predictable story

The ending was so anti-climatic; because if you've seen these type of movies, you know what's going on, and what's going to happen.

You see how Jeff Bridges is Professor Michael Faraday; being manipulated by the terrorists as he feeds off the death of his wife who was a Federal Agent who died in a shootout (a subtle reference to Randy Weaver family at Ruby Ridge); and his disdain for the Gov't not taking the blame for her death the deaths of others at an IRS building (another subtle reference: The Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building bombing). The terrorists put to good use, his paranoia, annoying and insipid behavior to paint a very unbecoming portrait of a man on the verge of the breaking point but, [above] suspicion.....until the end.

There was nothing new about a plot of this type genre. Pieced together from so many other plots in the past. The ending was really hokey. I mean, really hokey. Timothy Robbins did an excellent job of the terrorist leader/architect and master manipulator Oliver Lang/William Fenimore. December 20, 2008

Incredibly Tense, White-Knuckled, Nail-Gnawer of a Tale!

Hollywood hasn't made a literate white-knuckled conspiracy thriller like director's Mark Pellington's "Arlington Road" in many moons. The genre ran out of steam in the late 1970s. The late Alan J. Pakula came closest to capturing the essence of the conspiracy thriller with two memorable efforts "The Parallax View" (1974) and "All The President's Men" (1976). Oliver Stone revived the genre briefly with "JFK," but this star-studded marathon as good as it was lacked the visceral qualities of either Alfred Hitchcock's work or Pakula's pictures. Nothing about "JFK" surprised audiences. Stone, a filmmaker more controversial than any controversy he aroused, concerned himself more with uncovering the truth than captivating moviegoers. Indeed, David Miller's "Executive Action" (1973), a penny-thrifty thriller about the Kennedy assassination, entertains more than "JFK" on a fraction of its modest budget. Richard Donner's "Conspiracy Theory" (1997) and George P. Cosmatos' "Shadow Conspiracy" (1996) vanished almost as quickly as they showed up. Playwright David Mamet recaptured the ambiance of the conspiracy thriller with "The Spanish Prisoner", but the studio packed it off to the video rental shelves without much thought. Happily, after some doubts about whether it would open itself, "Arlington Road" made it to the big-screen. If he were alive, Alfred Hitchcock would probably applaud Mark Pellington for picking up where he left off.

"Arlington Road" appropriates many of Hitchcock's conventions. Michael Faraday (Jeff Bridges of "Thunderbolt and Lightfoot") resembles the quintessential Hitchcock hero. He is an average Joe with a white-collar job. He doesn't sleep with a gun under his pillow, and he doesn't careen around in a souped-up sports car with fancy gadgets. He wears a necktie instead of a pistol. Actually, he teaches American history, and he is a widowed, single-father raising his nine-year old son, Grant Faraday (Spencer Clark Treat). Further, Hitchcock staged scenes of nail-gnawing suspense in the least dangerous settings. Remember the sun-lit cornfield in "North by Northwest?" Or the shower in "Psycho?" Or the church in "Vertigo?" Similarly, the action in "Arlington Road" takes place in areas usually considered crime free. Wide open public meeting areas, shopping malls, well-lit university classrooms, and the idyllic seclusion of the suburbs, replete with backyard barbecues and dinner parties with wholesome neighbors. The people that made "Arlington Road" rely on this deceptive façade of tranquility to distract audiences long enough before they hit them with the year's best paranoid thriller.

"Arlington Road" opens with chilling images of a juvenile, Brady Lang (Mason Gamble), shambling down the middle of a street in an upper-middle-class, Virginia suburb on a bright sunny day. He clutches the charred stump of his hands. Blood dribbles onto his sneakers. Driving home from George Washington University where he lectures about terrorism, Michael Faraday spot the injured youth and speeds him to the emergency room. Michael neither knows who Brady is nor where he lives. Later, at the hospital, Brady's grateful parents, Oliver (Tim Robbins of "Mystic River") and his wife Cheryl (Joan Cusack of "Grosse Pointe Blank"), arrive and thank him. Initially, Michael is surprised to learn that the Langs live across the street from him. Oliver explains that Brady hurt himself while apparently fooling around with fireworks, but he dismisses the accident as nothing more than "a failed rocketry experiment." Gradually, a closely knit relationship develops between Michael and the Langs. At the same time, Brady and Grant become fast friends. "Our house is your house," Cheryl says with irony: "We're here for you, we really are." At a dinner party, Faraday introduces the Langs to Brooke Wolfe (Hope Davis of "The Matador"), a former graduate student who is now his girlfriend and colleague. Cheryl compliments them; they make a cute couple. Oliver exhibits the work he does as a structural architect. Cheryl confines herself to the home as the happy housewife that never complains while she rears their two daughters and son. Apparently, the only difference between the Langs and TV's "Brady Bunch" is three children and a housekeeper.

Meanwhile, "Reindeer Games" scenarist Ehren Kruger's award-winning script parcels out bits and pieces of exposition about Michael. Faraday's late wife (Laura Poe) worked for the FBI and died tragically in the line-of-duty when the Feds bungled a raid on the cabin of a suspected terrorist. "Leah died for her country," Whit Carver (Robert Gossett), Leah's old partner at the FBI, consoles Michael. "She didn't have to," Michael shakes his head in grief at her gravesite. Grant still suffers from the loss of his mom and bridles at the presence of Brooke, the new woman in Faraday's life. Michael himself has not totally recovered his Leah's death and pours his anxieties into his lectures about terrorism. As a history professor, Michael enjoys lecturing about domestic terrorism. He promotes conspiracy theories in the classroom and provides his students with hand-outs teeming with photos and news articles about anarchy. He refuses to believe that a single individual, no matter how resourceful, could carry out an act of terrorism on American soil without help.

"The Mothman Prophecies" director Mark Pellington acquits himself admirably as a cinematic stylist of the highest order. After a whirlwind opening, Pellington lets the dust settle and carefully lets the tension build. Although Michael and the Langs grow closer as friends, our hero ferrets out incriminating evidence about the Langs that surprises and then disturbs him. He alienates his own son and Brooke thinks that he has lost his mind. As it turns out, Oliver isn't the man that he claims to be and Michael has the college year books to prove his point. Lenser Bobby Bukowski and Pellington surround Faraday with darkness and isolate him in their pictorial compositions. Even Wit Carver has doubts about Michael's sanity and warns him that he is heading toward oblivion. Pellington frames Faraday in increasingly tighter close-ups to suggest the mental claustrophobia that his crusade is causing him. Altogether, conspiracy theorists will want to watch "Arlington Road" over and over, especially in light of 9/11. December 9, 2008

Awful!

I can't tell you why without revealing a crucial plot twist; however, I can say that everything leading up to the climax suddenly depends on things just happening to work out right. The success of a very intricate plan suddenly becomes dependent on numerous chances that the writer & director must have thought made the plot event more clever. Wrong. May 25, 2008

An Unintentionally Good Film about the "Far-Right"

Everyone have seen "American History X", which "realistically" portrays what I imagine American screenwriters must think life is like for so-called "Extreme Right-wingers", but while that was a feast of Semitical Correctness gone wild, this particular film is actually quite good. The story centres around a college professor, Michael Faraday played by Jeff Bridges, teaching, among other things, a class on "domestic terrorism". Faraday has recently lost his FBI-wife in an incident involving one of the many "militia groups", but where the blame was squarely on the side of the FBI. Hence, he is a bitter man, bearing a grudge against the FBI, but trying to live his life as normal, for the sake of his lonely nine year old son.

After saving the life of the neighbours' son, (the Lang's) he befriends them, and within their family his isolated son finds a new friend in the Lang's son. Eventually, he grows suspicious of his neighbour (Oliver Lang played by Tim Robbins) and his past, and starts to suspect he is in fact a member of the "Far Right" and is plotting an attack on the Federal Government. But unlike most films from the hands of Hollywood, these "extremists" are actually portrayed as normal people with a just cause, not the drooling maniacs we're usually served in every second film, so to speak. As Faraday says himself in one of his classes, most people in American history of any note would today be labelled "terrorists", and would certainly have taken up arms a long time ago, if they were alive today.

Unlike the ending of American History X, which was completely defeatist and meaningless, this one actually ends well for the good people. Sometimes you wonder how a film such as this made it through censorship, but I guess they think we should feel all "horrified" at the idea of someone actually having faith in God, higher causes and wanting to change the future for something better. Well, they failed.

Recommended. 4 stars. March 31, 2008

Intense But Disappointing Movie

This movie keeps the tension fairly high throughout, but the final half-hour gets unrealistically wacky. Although the very surprising ending is dramatic and then.. well, you may find it terriboy unsatisfying. But, I think the whole movie was overdone. I think the actors acted like they were on steroids, especially Jeff Bridges. At the end, you see why they had him acting so hyper, but still, it wasn't realistic. Also, there was more than a whiff of political B.S. -- as you might expect from any movie Tim Robbins is in -- particularly when it comes to painting the FBI as bad guys and the fanatics as right-wingers. This is one of those movies you'll forget about ten minutes after it ends. March 29, 2008

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