Arlington Road Review
by Stephen Graham Jones (lisgj AT LIB DOT TTU DOT EDU)October 5th, 1999
When someone's paranoid in a movie and no believes him or her, that paranoia will be justified. It's cliche. Similarly, when the neighbors are perfect, they aren't. In Arlington Road, Michael Faraday, (Jeff Bridges) teacher of an American-Terrorism course, suspects his neighbors just might be terrorists. And no one believes him. And this isn't the second installment of Blown Away. It does fade-in moments after an explosion, though, with one of the strongest opening sequences since se7en, which both sets the combustible tone for the rest of the movie and, in economical fashion, serves to introduce widower Faraday to his new neighbors, Oliver Lang (Tim Robbins)and stepford-wife Cheryl (Joan Cusack).
Soon enough Faraday begins to uncover what we already know from the trailer: that the Langs aren't perfect. Which makes all the foreshadowing concerning them a little heavy-handed, but so be it. In writer Ehren Kruger's credit, however, Faraday's dawning suspicion is at least layered in with grief for his wife, which is effecting his current relationship with his girlfriend, whose presence is causing something of a rift between Faraday and his son, etc. And all this develops more or less simultaneously, to the point where it begins to seem this may all be one of those narratives where the emotionally-maimed protagonist (Faraday) is only able to achieve cathartic release via immersion in some high-tension storyline.
But it's not.
At it's most basic level it's closer to another narrative, most recently commercialized in Sleepers : the criminal initially getting away with the crime, then somewhere down the road encountering one of his victims wholly by chance, who metes out justice. But too, and in spite of its cast, Sleepers was a failure. Arlington Road isn't, again thanks to strong writing, to the fact that Oliver Lang isn't directly implicated in the death of Faraday's wife, but is instead simply identified as the type whose file gets flagged by the FBI. Faraday's wife died investigating such a flag. Constructing it this way you get the association without the causality, which--because not dependent upon serendipity--is even stronger. Meaning we wholly expect Faraday to mete out some long-overdue justice to Lang, which is right where Kruger wants us: these carefully cultured expectations allow Arlington Road to use less contrivance to turn everything upside down, which it does very effectively in the closing frames. And quietly.
The thing is, in a movie about bombs, the plot's about subtlety. Not just the inevitable surprise we've come to anticipate, but a development which forces us to reconstruct the whole movie scene by scene. Which is rarely done well. Even rarer is that, in retrospect, (and disregarding the opening sequence) every prior event is open to dual interpretation. Perhaps it was Mark Pellington's unobtrusive camerawork that eased our suspicions; perhaps it was simply Tim Robbins and Jeff Bridges on-screen together, never a mistimed delivery or stray eyebrow between them. Either way, Arlington Road is far and away the best college-professor-just-trying-to-get-out-alive movie since D.O.A., though it is loyal to it all the same.
(c) 1999 Stephen Graham Jones
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