"Arlington Road"
The idea of a slick Hollywood thriller is a tricky thing. The film wants to give the audience the thrills they were promised, but yet the artists involved also want to give the audience something of substance. A carefully realized thought or topical plotline that can give the otherwise lightweight film so much dramatic weight. "Arlington Road" is the perfect example of this type of movie. A movie that tries to balance both thrills and thought on the same platter.
Michael Faraday (Jeff Bridges) is a professor who teaches a course in terrorism at a local college. When he rescues a neighbor's child from death one afternoon, Michael begins to get to know the mysterious nearby residents(Tim Robbins, Joan Cusack), letting them into his life and into the life of his child and girlfriend (Hope Davis). When Michael begins to suspect the couple of possible militia involvement, he unknowingly sets off a chain reaction of events that will change his life forever.
Director Mark Pellington is a veteran of music videos (Pearl Jam's "Jeremy") and one other feature, 1997's ultra thin "Going All The Way". His style is very specific: throw the camera around a bit, light the whole thing with a $1.99 flashlight - who cares if this artistic choice hinders the scene - and most importantly, get great actors to spew out incredibly bad lines of dialog but still are able to retain a certain amount of credibility. This is a very junky thriller with lots of potential but Pellington is not a very good director and "Arlington Road" is about half of a great film. While tension-filled, the film doesn't ever really take off the way most of us would love to see. The film remains too grounded in it's own pretentious delivery to ever breathe freely.
Jeff Bridges is coming off playing the most career-defining role he has ever played, that of Jeff Lebowski in the Coen Brother's "The Big Lebowski"(but you can call him "The Dude"). It was a brilliant performance, cementing Bridges's reputation as the best of his breed. A real middle American actor with range to spare and talent to burn. "Arlington" asks Bridges to turn his trademark wild-eyed paranoia bit into a full scale performance. Nobody can play skepticism like Bridges. Nobody. It comes as no wonder to tell you that Jeff Bridges is the one thing that keeps you glued to the screen in "Arlington". All the twists and turns in the world cannot save a inherently bad film. Bridges makes you want to see what the outcome of this highly implausible thriller is going to be. At turns heartbreaking (in scenes involving Michael's recollection of his dead wife) and deeply disturbing (the discovery of the dying boy that opens the film), Bridges's performance is spot-on the entire film.
The rest of the cast is less successful. I admire Tim Robbins more for his directing lately than his acting. The film doesn't give Robbins much more to do except look menacing. It's not one of his superior performances. Joan Cusack is also wasted in a role that is way beneath what she is capable of. What she does do with her small character leaves a mark, but so much more should have been accomplished with her. I blame Ehren Kruger's ungraceful script. The screenplay is full of twists, each one a little more theatrical than the last. I know that this is a movie with a movie plot, but Kruger occasionally drops tidbits of real interesting dialog and story with Michael 's lectures to his terrorism class. These scenes are the best in the film. They give the character the depth needed for the climax of the film, and they truly give off the uneasy vibe of militias and terrorism that the rest of the film works overtime to achieve.
The ending of "Arlington Road" is one that will be the one thing most talked about when this movie is discussed. It is very disturbing, very vivid, and entirely appropriate. It's also one I wish I could explain in great detail here, but I won't. This conclusion is something that Pellington and Kruger do perfectly. The rest of the film is never really inadequate, just missing something that obviously Pellington couldn't provide: a strict narrative and appropriate visual choices. I wish him luck in the future, but if he never makes another film, that will be good luck for us all.----- 6
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