ARLINGTON ROAD (1999)
A Film Review
Copyright Dragan Antulov 2005
Some Hollywood films, while not good in depicting the world in which
they were made, are good in presenting the mindset of their makers. One
of those films is ARLINGTON ROAD, 1999 thriller directed by Mark Pellington.
Protagonist of the film is Michael Faraday (played by Jeff Bridges),
history professor who lives in quiet Washington suburb with his young
son Grant (played by Spencer Treat Clark). One day, while driving on the
street, he sees young boy named Brady Lang (played by Mason Gamble)
being injured and rushes him to hospital. There he finds that boy's
parents – structural engineer Oliver (played by Tim Robbins) and his
wife Cheryl (played by Joan Cusack) – just happen to be his next door
neighbours. Since they also happen to be nice and friendly people, he
becomes a regular guest in their house, just as Grant becomes Brady's
best friend. But gradually Michael begins to spot certain details about
Langs – the inconsistencies in their biographies, strange-looking
blueprints and great interest in explosives. Michael, who teaches
terrorism course at university and whose wife, an FBI agent, had been
killed in botched raid on right-wing extremists, doesn't take that
lightly. As time goes by, he becomes convinced that Langs are pair of
dangerous right-wing extremists who are about to blow up government
buildings. However, when he expresses those fears to his girlfriend
Brooke Wolfe (played by Hope Davis) and FBI, they all treat them as the
product of paranoid mind.
In its time, ARLINGTON ROAD was hailed as one of the better thrillers to
come from Hollywood. The main reason was in the script by Ehren Kruger.
It used the formula of countless 1990s Hollywood thrillers – seemingly
nice man who just turns out to be dangerous evildoer – and updated it to
what many Americans saw as reality after the traumatic bombing of
Oklahoma City federal building. In Kruger's script dangerous psychopath
was replaced by legions of right-wing extremists who hide in the
mainstream of society and wait for the proper moment when they would
unleash the mayhem on unsuspecting American democracy. This concept
fitted perfectly with the dominant ideological mindset of 1990s
Hollywood. For most of American filmmakers the real danger to the
semi-utopian world of prosperous, progressive and all-powerful Clinton's
America came not from the outside, but from the inside. The real threat
came Christian fundamentalism and all the political Right – forces that
were, in Hollywood's view at the time, on decline and tried to
compensate the inevitable decrease of their influence with increased
extremism. Those views were portrayed convincingly in ARLINGTON ROAD, at
least to a point. It could be attributed to Pellington's skilful
direction and great acting by Robbins and Cusack. Kruger, to a certain
point, maintains the level of suspense by allowing viewers to think that
the grand terrorist conspiracy can be nothing more product of
protagonist's paranoia.
Unfortunately, in the last thirty minutes, ARLINGTON ROAD begins to fall
apart. Once the answer to the viewers' most important question has been
given, all what is left for Kruger and Pellington is to bring the film
to its conclusion. However, they try do it with unconventional
`surprise' ending, which isn't that surprising to those who happened to
watch PARALLAX VIEW, 1970s film dealing with similar kind of subjects.
And even those who haven't watch that film are likely to realise that
the final plot resolution was achieved at the expense of logic and
credibility, thus undermining the very realism which was at the basis of
the film.
And events that occurred few years showed how ARLINGTON ROAD, just like
so many Hollywood thrillers, was far away from reality. One of greatest
ironies of this film was in being discredited and validated by history
at the same time. They showed that American security is much shakier
than most people would like to believe and they also showed that the
evil manifests itself in the forms that are both simpler and deadlier
than anything Hollywood screenwriters' imagination could produce.
RATING: 5/10 (++)
Review written on March 24th 2005
Dragan Antulov a.k.a. Drax
http://film.purger.com
Film Reviews in Croatian/Filmske recenzije na hrvatskom
http://draxreview.blogspot.com
Draxblog Movie Reviews
http://www.ofcs.org
Online Film Critics Society
========== X-RAMR-ID: 39614 X-Language: en X-RT-ReviewID: 1371942 X-RT-TitleID: 1088160 X-RT-SourceID: 1650 X-RT-AuthorID: 1307 X-RT-RatingText: 5/10
The review above was posted to the
rec.arts.movies.reviews newsgroup (de.rec.film.kritiken for German reviews).
The Internet Movie Database accepts no responsibility for the contents of the
review and has no editorial control. Unless stated otherwise, the copyright
belongs to the author.
Please direct comments/criticisms of the review to relevant newsgroups.
Broken URLs inthe reviews are the responsibility of the author.
The formatting of the review is likely to differ from the original due
to ASCII to HTML conversion.
Related links: index of all rec.arts.movies.reviews reviews