DIRECTOR
Mark
Pellington
SCREENWRITER
Ehren
Kruger
PRODUCERS
Tom Gorai
Marc Samuelson
Peter Samuelson
CINEMATOGRAPHER
Bobby Bukowski
MUSIC
Angelo Badalamenti
tomandandy
EDITOR
Conrad Buff IV
CAST
Jeff Bridges (Michael Faraday)
Tim Robbins (Oliver Lang)
Joan Cusack (Cheryl Lang)
Hope Davis (Brooke Wolfe)
Robert Gossett (Agent Carver)
Mason Gamble (Brady Lang)
Spencer Treat Clark (Grant Faraday)
Stanley Anderson (Dr. Archer Scobee)
MPAA rating: R
Running
time: 117m
U.S. release: July 9, 1999
Video availability: VHS - DVD
Other Mark
Pellington films
reviewed on this website:
- The
Mothman Prophecies
|
Is
it possible for a thriller -- any thriller -- to surprise
us any more? We go to these things, after all, expecting a certain
number of generic twists and turns; there is some comfort (and
more than a little boredom) in our knowledge that a thriller
will play by the rules, follow the accepted mainstream template.
Increasingly, one has to look outside the studio system. Arlington
Road got a nationwide opening and has big-name stars, but
notice its distributor: Sony Screen Gems. In other words, this
is something of an indie thriller in big-studio sheep's clothing.
The movie is both darker and more intimate than you expect.
Arlington Road grabs you from its stressful pre-credits
scene, in which history professor Michael Faraday (Jeff Bridges),
driving along one afternoon, happens across a boy limping in
the middle of the road, dazed and bleeding. The boy, it turns
out, had been messing around with a homemade bomb and nearly
blew his hand off. Michael scoops the boy up and rushes him to
the hospital; he eventually discovers that the kid is one of
three children in the happy family of Oliver and Cheryl Lang
(Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack), who live just across the street
from Michael and his own little boy. Michael anguishes over the
idea that he didn't know the name of his neighbors' son, but
we sense that Oliver and Cheryl have been unknown to Michael
up to this point because they wanted to be unknown.
As it happens, Michael is carrying more than the usual amount
of modern American paranoia. His wife, an FBI agent, was killed
in a senseless exchange of fire at a remote West Virginia shack;
he immerses himself in his courses, where he teaches the history
of terrorism and is prone to impassioned rants about the government
and their official lies. Jeff Bridges, who could sell snow to
Eskimos, lets us see Michael not as a conspiracy nut but as a
grieving widower trying to make sense of a world where children
are blown to bits in day-care centers. And he's starting to suspect
good-buddy neighbor Oliver of plotting to blow up a building.
Sharply directed by Mark Pellington, and written by Ehren Kruger
with an ear for banal suburban banter hiding sinister truths,
Arlington Road lulls us for a while into thinking it's
about the misplaced mistrust of our era. Tim Robbins and Joan
Cusack (whose character could have been fleshed out more) don't
make the mistake of playing Oliver and Cheryl as "Hi honey,
I'm home" cartoons. They are legitimately likable people,
and we want to believe Oliver when, feeling hurt and insulted,
he confronts Michael about the snooping he's been doing. We begin
to wonder if Michael is merely a good man deranged by loss and
obsessed with the spectre of terrorism in every house, at every
backyard barbecue.
But the movie has a few curves in store for us, leading to a
regrettable car chase that's a little too drawn out. Yet even
the car chase, as I look back on it, has come to seem fairly
subversive. A car chase is usually the appetizer before the main
course, the standard climax in which the hero confronts the villain
and blows him away. As Michael points out to his class, we need
a narrative -- both in movies and in our daily news -- in which
only one loner is responsible for an atrocity, and once he dies,
his evil dies with him. Let's just say Arlington Road
isn't that narrative. With its big-name stars and its fender-crunching
pre-climax, the movie lulls you into a false sense of security;
just when you think you've grasped it, it blows up in your hand. |
