PARANOYING
ARLINGTON ROAD Directed by Mark Pellington Screenplay by Ehren Kruger With Jeff Bridges, Tim Robbins UA South R 117 min.
Whether or not "Arlington Road" slips in beneath your tolerance radar screen depends on a variety of factors -- how much you like improbable action/adventure, how much of a stickler you are for plausibility, how much coincidence you can stand, how much umbrage you take at having your intelligence insulted, that sort of thing. On the plus side, it's pretty well-acted, with some good fast-paced suspense sequences. On the minus side, it's a ridiculous, sloppy piece of junk.
The movie was ready for release last year but was held off because of public sensitivity about the very similar Oklahoma City bombing, and then derailed again earlier this year by the Columbine shootings. It finally saw a window of opportunity between spasms of American violence and got its opening.
Jeff Bridges plays Michael Faraday, a widower teaching a course about terrorism at a Washington university. He doesn't seem to have any other classes, or much else to do besides cope with his withdrawn son (Spencer Treat Clark) and girlfriend Brooke (Hope Davis), and brood in his dark house about his deceased wife, an FBI agent who was killed in a botched Ruby Ridge-type raid. Until, that is, he meets the neighbors. Oliver and Cheryl Lang (Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack) are what God had in mind when He created the Midwest. But Michael, with precious little to go on beyond Oliver's pudding face and porridge-bowl haircut, begins to suspect that his Ozzie-and-Harriet neighbors are really Mr. and Mrs. Tim McVeigh. He can't convince anybody -- not Brooke (who leaves the room every time he mentions his late wife), not his wife's old FBI colleague (Robert Gossett).
A premise of the movie is that Americans would rather feel safe than get to the bottom of things, and once we've arrested somebody in a terrorist case we don't even want to think about far-reaching conspiracies. The core idea on which this exercise in paranoia is constructed is an intriguing one, but so much of Ehren Kruger's screenplay turns on the most far-fetched coincidences and improbabilities that it stumbles over itself like a drunk in an earthquake. It's the kind of movie you come out of with a laundry list of protests, and then keep thinking of more on the way home. It fails Alfred Hitchcock's cheese sandwich test -- if a thriller is successful, you won't think about its holes until you've had time to get home and are making a cheese sandwich.
The ending toward which the movie drives us (with depressing literalness) is a nice twist, but getting there isn't much fun, and again we're asked to swallow plot devices that require people to act unerringly in very specific and highly unlikely ways. If my plan for blowing up a federal building depended on such unpredictable behavior, I doubt I could get any respectable terrorist organization this side of the Mississippi to back it.
Bridges and Robbins are good, but show-stealing honors go to the wonderful Joan Cusack, whose smile will never strike you as quite so innocent and goofy again.
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