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
From
The New Yorker
Jeff Bridges spends most of this movie looking extremely worried, and so would you if you thought a major American terrorist had moved in across the street. Bridges plays a college lecturer, specializing in terrorism, who befriends a neighbor couple named the Langs (Tim Robbins and an even scarier Joan Cusack); the question is whether they are befriending him back or using him for evil purposes. Mark Pellington's paranoid movie tends to state its intentions too baldly, and his evident desire to contribute to the debate over America's self-inflicted wounds seems like wishful thinking; but the film is undoubtedly creepy (the first ten minutes, in particular, are tough to watch), and most of the shocks strike home. What will divide viewers is the plot; either the ending makes no sense or it forces you to rethink everything that went before. At least the moral of the picture is unambiguous: if you want to live, don't look in other people's mailboxes. -Anthony Lane
Copyright 2006 The New Yorker
