Arlington Road Reviewed

ROVIN' AND RAVIN' WITH MIKE

Twists and Turns on Arlington Road

This summer, the filmmakers have tried to keep anyone old enough to see an R-rated flick out of the theatres. We’ve seen ads for two different films that feature guys urinating. Does that really make you want to push your way into the megaplexes at too many hard-earned bucks a pop?

Advertising notwithstanding, the studios have been good to us folks of a certain age or at least of a certain mentality—who want a film to give us more than an excuse to eat over-priced popcorn in the dark. Beginning with the lushly textured Tea with Mussolini, and going on through the flawed but intriguing Instinct and Summer of Sam, we’ve had reason to turn off the VCR and head for the not-so-big screens. This week, we have Arlington Road, director Mark Pellington’s old-fashioned thriller updated with contemporary political concerns and a surprise ending that will knock you off the edge of your seat, where you will probably perch for the last half of the film.

From the first moments, this yarn sets up something uneasy about the cramped, sterile Virginia suburb where George Washington University professor Michael Faraday (Jeff Bridges) lives with his son and his not quite live-in graduate student girlfriend Brooke (Hope Davis). Looming over the household are Faraday’s memories of his wife, an FBI agent killed in a botched raid of a suspected terrorist group at Copper Creek (which in its alliteration and broad outline recalls Ruby Ridge). What would be just another dreary commute to the darkest house outside of The X-Files changes with a dazed, wounded boy the same age as Faraday’s son stumbling down the middle of Arlington Road. Faraday rushes him to the emergency room, where he is soon joined by the boy’s parents, Oliver and Cheryl Lang (Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack).

The obsessive energy of Faraday’s frantic response to the boy’s injuries (sustained, we are told, during his unsupervised use of fireworks) suddenly drops. The faceless, nameless suburb comes alive, as he and Brooke swap dinners with the Langs, and the two boys share meals, games, and membership in a boys’ organization somewhat like Boy Scouts.

Soon this sanitized suburban dream—somewhere between The Truman Show and Pleasantville —appears not quite right. Joan Cusack, far from her performance in 1980’s My Bodyguard, gives a creepy, robotic edge to her characterization of a loving wife and mother. Wrongly addressed letters show up in Faraday’s mailbox. Frankly, it’s not enough to sustain interest, but trust me. Stick with it, even Faraday’s over-long therapy-as-lectures in his class on terrorism.

Four memorable performances help us through slow stretches. Cusack’s dry understatement balances Tim Robbins (on other screens this summer as the President of the United States in Austin Powers, The Spy Who has a subtitle not fit for a community free-net). He piles on contradictory emotions and motivations: loving father, faithful friend, misunderstood victim, or heartless terrorist?

Hope Davis does her best to fill out the flimsiest role in the film. But Jeff Bridges is the star and then some. In his forty-nine year career (not bad for a guy who is just fifty), Bridges has brought a solidity, a foundation to some memorable characterizations. Ranging from the earthy Dude of 1998’s Big Lebowski, to the otherworldly Starman in 1984’s film of that title, he has created the persona of a survivor, someone who has the strength to endure if not the fortitude to prevail, an intriguing everyman of our time. His performances enriched two of my own favorite films, Max Klein (for whom I've named two cats) in 1993’s Fearless and Jack Lucas in 1991’s Fisher King. About that forty-nine year career, his first, uncredited appearance in a film was as an infant, an inspired bit of casting, when he was a year old.

By the time the movie slips into its second hour, everything is set up, worked out, and put in gear. Hold on. There is a furious car chase through Washington, DC, which, like so many car chases, has the odd effect of simply boring: there are only so many ways to make tires squeal. All the tangents, clues, and innuendoes come together. Screenwriter Ehren Kruger, backed up by some wonderful, expressive music by Angelo Badalamenti, turns a suburban road into a nightmare roller coaster.

The film has been on the shelf for a while, first caught in the sale of the studio and then delayed after the Columbine shootings. Pushing the envelopes of life and art, of reality and fiction, perhaps, Pellington creates an alternative reality, where a federal office building was bombed in St. Louis, not in Oklahoma City, where something like the raid on Ruby Ridge occurred, but in a place called Copper Creek. Even where…. Go see for yourself.

Keep your feet dry as you amble along your own Arlington Road and your heart full of noble thoughts—but watch out for those new neighbors!