It must have been an exciting pitch session to get this movie bankrolled. "What would you do if your neighbor was the Unabomber?" Building on this interesting premise, two suburbanites are pitted against each other in a test of wits and action that wants to be as thought-provoking as it is horrific.
The film opens with disturbing footage of a young boy meandering down the typical, middle-class street of a quiet West Virginia town. When the protagonist, Professor Michael Faraday (Jeff Bridges), nearly runs over the boy in his car, he discovers the boy's arm is badly burned and whisks him away to the local hospital like a true hero. It is one of the movie's most powerfully unsettling scenes. The boy's parents and Faraday's new neighbors, Oliver and Cheryl Lang (Tim Robbins & Joan Cusack), show up to retrieve the injured boy and profusely thank his savior.
Faraday is a professor of history at nearby Georgetown University, and it just so happens that he teaches a course on terrorism. His late wife, a former FBI agent, was brutally murdered in a Ruby Ridge-like raid that got out of control, leaving Faraday to raise his son Grant on his own. Grateful for a new friendship, particularly since the boys are about the same age, the two neighborly households start spending time together in various innocuous activities like batting balls and sharing dinner. Of course, there are subtle hints and candid clues that the friendly Langs are not all that they appear to be. Smelling a terrorist rat, the suspicious Faraday embarks on a reckless search to uncover his neighbor's besmirched past and baleful plans for the future. The rest is all confirmed suspicions, car chases, and minor explosions.
Regrettably, the premise promises more than the action, acting, and plot provide. As Faraday, Jeff Bridges is wildly schizophrenic but nearly unsympathetic. His agitated class discourses seem like a much too convenient convention to provide background information on terrorism and to display his bias that most terrorist acts are really the work of conspirators, not lone madmen. It is no surprise, therefore, when his neighbors appear to be involved in a far-reaching conspiracy to blow up a building in Washington, D.C. What is surprising, however, is how much of a proverbial pushover Bridges appears to be in this role, stumbling through the action like a preoccupied dope when the role could have been played with more cleverness and gravity. This is Bridges-lite.
Real life left-wing activist Tim Robbins depicts the friendly neighbor turned right-wing zealot part with such seeming innocence that it is hard to buy him as the movie's heavy-weight villain. He is just never "bad enough," and his lack of evil umph only further reinforces Bridge's overacting. Although it is not clear if his portrayal as the duplicitous, crazy Christian is meant as a ruse to distract from the truth or not, the result is yet another embarrassing depiction of Christians as enemies of the state. Joan Cusack as his wife is far more creepy than Robbins, but she has little to do besides show up in odd places with a disturbing grin.
Hope Davis, the talented star of Next Step Wonderland, is Brooke Wolfe, the former graduate student that Faraday has befriended and bedded. Her role is relegated to warning Faraday of his burgeoning paranoia, yet she is the most natural of all the characters. Robert Gossett's turn as the FBI Agent, Whit Carver, is wasted by good cop/bad cop clichés.
These otherwise adept actors can hardly be faulted for this film, however, which provides very few real thrills and a lot of ludicrous plot devices. Much has been made of the movie's "surprise ending," which is more so-so than stellar. Wading through the rest of the film to get to it is hardly worth it. In the meantime, the viewer must suffer through predictable plot turns, lackluster tension builders, and too much typical thriller triteness. You know, for example, that the phone guy outside is really tapping the line, and that the two main characters will come to fisticuffs before the duel is over. If there really are secret enclaves of underground militia in this country just itching to blow up another federal building, they undoubtedly depend less on dumb luck and happenstance than these sorry antagonists. The question is not who will win, but who cares. We should, because terrorism is a truly nasty business, indeed. But this movie only spars with our nation's present preoccupation with fear, when a few forceful knockout punches would have been more effective.
Worst of all, the movie commits many grievous and obvious errors in the way of filming and lighting. Many scenes are intentionally so dark it is hard to make out what is happening, and others are darkened merely to create a spooky atmosphere. The camera angles and points of view foreshadow conclusions far too early, and the paltry special effects shots look pathetically cheap. In contrast, the movie's opening credit sequence renders many typical suburban scenes through disturbing camera effects, but the movie falls to live up to these first few menacing minutes. Everything from the script to the acting and the directing is under-boiled.
The ideas behind this film are far more disturbing than this movie renders them. Maybe that's a good thing. Regardless, as for Arlington Road--just don't go there.
Steven Stuart Baldwin (7/14/99)
