by Curtis Edmonds -- blueduck@hsbr.org
I hate it when people talk at movies.
Usually, when audience members talk during a movie, it shows a fundamental lack of disrespect to the moviemakers, the actors, and their fellow patrons. If they're talking about plot points they missed in the movie, it shows that they're easily confused or just not paying attention. If they're talking about things other than the movie -- like where to go for dinner afterward -- that's a sign that you're dealing with people who are totally oblivious to their environment and to moviegoing etiquette.
I don't have any way to measure this, but I believe it's getting worse. I went to see Lawrence of Arabia last week at the Paramount Theater in Austin (in 70mm format, the only way to go) and this woman behind me asked her date what year the movie was set in... and he gave her a ten thousand word masters thesis on World War I and the Triple Entente. This intermixed with a blow by blow account of the first ten minutes of the movie that she had missed while standing in line to get popcorn. He talked almost the whole way through the movie... no mean feat when we're talking about a three-hour movie.
I say that to say two things. First, if you're the kind of person who talks at movie theaters, you might want to consider renting movies instead, so you can talk all you want without disturbing other people.
Second, Arlington Road has the best screenplay of the summer. I know this because during every slack moment in the second half of the movie, I could hear everyone else in the theater whispering to each other, trying to keep up with the twisty plot. It wasn't individual voices as such, but a general background buzz from bewildered people trying to figure out what was coming next.
In this, possibly the dumbest summer in movie history, the summer of Jar-Jar Binks, the summer dedicated to the glorification of the lowest common denominator, Arlington Road is... Yes! A Smart Movie! Arlington Road is not one of your artsy-fartsy Merchant Ivory films that you need a degree in art history to appreciate, mind you, it's just a thriller... but it's a smart thriller that stays two or three mental steps ahead of its audience and never insults our intelligence by asking us to believe anything really stupid. The plot is simple enough -- a family of terrorists move across the street from a terrorism expert, who gets suspicious -- but the elaborations of that plot are deftly done.
For example, we know from the outset as an audience that the Tim Robbins character is an evil terrorist. We know this because movies about people who have unfounded suspicions about their wacky neighbors don't do very well. We know this because of the credit sequence, which shows us negatives of dogs and picket fences and crabgrass and lets us know that evil lurks in the heart of suburbia. And we know this because Robbins plays his character with a featureless, dull exterior that proves that he's hiding something.
But what makes Arlington Road so smart is that the Jeff Bridges character doesn't know any of this stuff. He's got his suspicions, but they're based on next to nothing. Bridges finds out, for example, that the Robbins character is from St. Louis, where terrorists blew up that federal building. (Arlington Road pretends that the Murrah Building bombing took place in St. Louis, but knows that we're smart enough to see through this.) Ipso facto, Robbins is a terrorist, right? But Bridges can't make anyone believe this but us. There's one wrenching scene where he's trying to explain things to Hope Davis (in the unappreciated girlfriend role), and he's raving like a Class-A nutter, and she's holding him, and he can't stop spouting off about how this guy next door is a terrorist.
Another sign of intelligence from Arlington Road is how it handles the inherent insanity in the setup. It makes sense, in a twisted, paranoid sort of way, that the Bridges character would see terrorists everywhere, but what would motivate the Robbins character to move right next door to him? (The housing shortage in DC isn't that bad, is it?) Arlington Road has an answer to this, one I won't share with you.
In fact, when you get right down to it, when you have a movie that's this smart, with smart plot twists, there's not that much you can say about it without spoiling the fun for everyone. The minor things that help make the movie work -- the pouty curve of Hope Davis's mouth, the perky smile of Joan Cusack, the way the Robbins' two little girls look in plaid jumpers while they bar the door to the house, the horrible things that happen to Bridges's perfect hair during the course of the movie, Tim Robbins lip-synching to the words of the Boy Scout oath --are great, but they're secondary to the sinuous curve of the screenplay as it unwinds itself.
For all fans of Smart Movies, Arlington Road is as welcome as a tall glass of lemonade during a heat wave, with smart performances, smart casting, and smart directing complementing an exceptionally smart screenplay. This... yes! is a movie to talk about.
(Just not in the theater while the movie is going on, please, and... HEY! Put that cell phone down! NOW! People are trying to watch the movie, you know...) -- Curtis D. Edmonds blueduck@hsbr.org
"First, you show up. Then you see what happens."
-- Napoleon Bonaparte
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