July 9, 1999 | For as along as you remain inside the theater – perched, more often than not, on the edge of your seat – Arlington Road is suspenseful and persuasive enough to keep you plugged into its paranoid melodramatics. After the closing credits, however, you’re not so easily distracted from the evasions and ellipses.
Once you start to replay the movie in your mind – maybe as early as when you reach the lobby – you begin to see past the smoke and mirrors. You ask yourself questions, puzzle over fuzzy details, tally the number of plot holes. Worst of all, you can’t help wondering in retrospect whether an early plot development is intended as an ironically tragic coincidence or a monstrously evil contrivance.
Jeff Bridges gives a shrewdly calculated performance as Michael Faraday, a widowed history professor who lives on the suburban street of the title, and teaches a course in domestic terrorism at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
Michael has more than an academic interest in his subject: His wife, an FBI agent, was killed in the line of duty during an ill-planned raid on right-wing fanatics. (Any resemblance between this event and the real-life tragedy at Ruby Ridge, Idaho isn’t coincidental.) Now a widowed single parent, he has begun to rebuild his life with the attentive help of Brooke Wolfe (Hope Davis), a beautiful – and, of course, substantially younger – graduate student. But Michael can’t help dwelling on the past, and stewing over the bureaucratic foul-ups that led to his wife’s death.
Nor can he help noticing that his cheery new neighbors, Oliver and Cheryl Lang, are behaving in a suspicious manner. Or, to be more precise, in a manner that Michael interprets as suspicious.
At first, Oliver (Tim Robbins) and Cheryl (Joan Cusack) appear no more threatening than Ward and June Cleaver. They have a young son who’s roughly the same age as Michael’s boy, and the kids spend a lot of time in each other’s houses. But Michael grows apprehensive when he discovers that Oliver isn’t exactly who he claims to be. And he becomes downright terrified when he learns precisely why Oliver felt compelled to assume a new identity.
Brooke blithely dismisses Michael’s worst-case scenario as a paranoid fantasy. And Whit Carver (Robert Gossett), an FBI agent who used to work with Michael’s wife, is every bit as skeptical. I don’t have to tell you what happens to these two non-believers, do I?
Even if you’ve somehow managed to avoid the spoiler-filled coming-attractions trailers and too-revealing TV spots, you won’t be shocked by the news that Michael’s darkest suspicions are entirely justified. (Let’s face it: When was the last time you saw a thriller in which the hero turned out to be a delusional paranoid? Conspiracy Theory doesn’t count – bad guys really were after Mel Gibson.) Screenwriter Ehren Kruger is good at many things – he’s particularly adept at hiding clues in plain sight – but he fails to raise any serious doubts about the true intentions of the likely suspects. And it doesn’t help much that, right from the start, Robbins is transparently untrustworthy, while Cusack comes across as a smiley Stepford Wife.
It would be unfair – and inaccurate – to say there are no surprises in Arlington Road. (There is at least one, a real doozy, near the very end.) And it can’t be denied that director Mark Pellington (Going All the Way) keeps the movie percolating with a skillfully sustained mood of mounting dread and jittery anxiousness. Sometimes impressionistic, sometimes hyper-naturalistic, his storytelling style often is more interesting than the formulaic substance.
When it’s all over, however, the house of cards collapses under the weight of close scrutiny. So consider yourself warned: The best way to enjoy Arlington Road is not to give it a second thought.
