Review: Arlington Road

Thrillers tend to be a dime a dozen -- the chase, the bad guy, the confrontation, clumsy reasoning, happy ending, fade to black. But a thriller that actually thrills and leaves you both feeling wired and worked over is a rarity. A thriller that actually does so with a subject that is both plausible and provocative is a miracle. The miracle is named Arlington Road, it is directed by Mark Pellington, written by Ehren Kruger, and is finally being released after the Columbine shootings caused studio executives to delay the picture's opening date.

The film opens ominously enough: a young boy (Mason Gamble) stumbling along pristine suburban streets. When Michael Faraday (Jeff Bridges) goes to help him, he sees the boy's hand has been blown off. He rushes the kid to the hospital and meets the concerned parents, Oliver and Cheryl Lang (Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack), who explain that their son Brady and his friends were fooling around with firecrackers. The Langs become close friends with Michael and his girlfriend Brooke (Hope Davis) while Michael's son Grant (Spencer Treat Clark) bonds instantly with Brady.

But something about Oliver is bothering Michael. Oliver claims he's a structural engineer but Michael uncovers some clues and picks up on enough holes in Oliver's tales to believe that Oliver may be involved in a deadlier profession -- a right-wing bomber. Michael's paranoia is not borne out of ignorance -- he is a college professor who teaches a course on American terrorism. His wife, an FBI agent, was shot and killed by a right-wing group during a botched FBI sting. Michael is learned about governmental procedures regarding terrorist bombings and points out to his class that sometimes those ultimately blamed for the bombings are scapegoats to ease the public's fears.

Maybe Brooke's right -- perhaps his course is getting to Michael, perhaps his wife's death still has him obsessing about vengeance. What right does Michael have to dig into his neighbor's past? Even if Oliver had committed a crime when he was younger, hasn't he turned his life around? Isn't Oliver Lang the perfect husband, the perfect father, the perfect neighbor? Isn't Oliver Lang Mr. All-American?

Well, the menace that lurks so blatantly beneath Robbins's doughy features hints that he is far from perfect. There's a fine line -- a very fine line -- between a vacuousness that's eerie and an eerie vacuousness and Cusack treads the line a little more expertly than Robbins does. Robbins tips his hand a bit earlier than he should have but Cusack remains unflappably cheery, just ever so suggestively insidious, until that chilling closeup of her smile slowly dissolving into something portentious. Bridges, still criminally underappreciated to this day, depicts the increasing suspicion and hysteria with precise pitch.

Terrorism is a dicey subject for a thriller but Arlington Road plays enough like a drama to make the subject a compelling rather than a poleaxed one. In many ways, it harks back to the heyday of the political thrillers or social suspensers like The China Syndrome and The Parallax View in the Seventies or earlier masterworks such as John Frankenheimer's The Manchurian Candidate or Alfred Hitchcock's Sabotage.

Pellington sustains the tension and the film contains a whopper of an ending. The brilliance of Kruger's award-winning script is that it could be real -- that's why the film ultimately unsettles. The film closes with a chilling montage of everyday people walking an everyday street and onto this picture is layered a scene of chaos: a building destroyed, people massacred -- the violence that could break out at any time. Are we ever truly safe? Is there something hiding behind that building? Is there something hiding behind that stranger's gaze? Or your neighbor's?

Arlington Road

Directed by: Mark Pellington

Written by: Ehren Kruger

Starring: Jeff Bridges, Tim Robbins, Joan Cusack, Hope Davis, Mason Gamble