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ARLINGTON ROAD Send This Review to a Friend
This thriller is good enough to make one wish it were better. The set-up is a beaut. Jeff Bridges plays Faraday, a professor specializing in teaching about terrorism. His wife has been killed under circumstances the film eventually explains. Faraday is raising their 10-year-old son. They live in a suburb of Washington, D.C., and an incident in which Faraday comes to the rescue of the boy next door leads to friendship with the boy's parents, Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack as the Langs. All is cheerful between the families, until Faraday begins to suspect that the Langs are not who they seem to be and may be up to something nefarious.
Paranoia seizes Faraday, whose girlfriend, played by Hope Davis, is swept into the web of fear. Soon "Arlington Road," scripted by Ehren Kruger and directed by Mark Pellington, is hell-bent toward lethal maneuvers involving Faraday's suspicion that a violent plot is afoot. The film vividly taps into the national concern resulting from the Oklahoma City bombing. What else can happen in an America under domestic terrorist attack?
The trouble is that the contrivances are piled on to such an extent that skepticism looms at every turn, particularly in the melodramatic build-up involving Faraday's son and in the super-charged climax. The fine cast is persuasive but the plot ultimately isn't. Nevertheless, the film is chilling in the way it demonstrates through a twist of duplicity the extent to which the public can be hoodwinked and why there is still so little confidence by so many in the supposed resolution of the John F. Kennedy assassination. A Screen Gems release.
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