See Arlington
Road only if you want some fun, Hitchcockian, rather brainless thrills. Jeff Bridges and Tim Robbins
are two of those rare actors who can make a worthwhile movie out of a
terrible script, but since this script gives them such terrible
dialogue, they instead make this look like an Olympic event for
overactors. If the director had seized the opportunity for camp and run
with that, this might have been hilarious. But somebody here is taking
this material far too seriously, and thus it becomes merely ridiculous.
Arlington Road
wants to be an intelligent thriller about the
threat of terrorism. It manipulates our feelings with images that recall the
Oklahoma City bombing and the Ruby Ridge incidents... after all, what good
American CAN'T be moved by that? But if you're going to bring up such heavy
subjects and portray them so graphically, you'd better have a good reason.
And this movie doesn't mean anything. It merely
exploits our fears and emotions to jerk us around.
In a film about
terrorism, it's rather a shame that only Joan Cusak comes away truly scary. Her
smile may be the most frightening thing on screens this year, outside of The Blair Witch
Project. Cusak, who is usually very funny, is even better at being the
creepy wife of a suspected terrorist.
And it's
a good thing she can act creepy, because if the audience stops to
think about the villains' plans, the whole thing falls apart. I'm not spoiling anything by telling you this: There's no way the
villains could have carried out the plan they carry out in this movie.
But it doesn't matter
much... the only person trying to stop them here is the dumbest
big screen hero in ages. Bridges plays a professor who teaches a course on terrorism that is nothing more than a
bunch of trite, naive, emotional speeches about what makes a terrorist; I believe any of
his students could have taught a better class.
He's also a sloppy paranoiac.
If you were
investigating your neighbors' criminal activity, would you sit right next to
the fence in the backyard with all of the evidence in your lap in plain
view... and then fall asleep?
The ending is
predictable, if you find a chance to think for a minute while the movie tries to distract
you with sound and fury. And boy oh boy does it work
hard to distract us. From the abraisive opening-credits sequence that assaulted me with strange
music and warped images of friendly neighborhoods, I was irritable. Why should I be
afraid? Nothing's happened yet? When Jeff Bridges finds an injured kid and
rushes him to the hospital, the camera flies around so anxiously that I almost fell out of
my seat. Bridges starts shouting at the hospital staff, who shout back, in an
insanely-choreographed and unbelievable prologue. We're already tired and stressed,
and we haven't even started eating our popcorn!
Okay... if you want to
see Arlington Road, you'll find out for yourself. But please, think about
this movie afterwards. Don't let it get under your skin. If
it has any lingering effect on viewers, it will have added to our cultural
anxieties about terrorism. You would do better to pick up
a book from the library that examines the subject with some
integrity. Movies like this only contribute to the
generation of people with bad tempers who are prone to
suspicion and road rage.
Jeffrey's Rating:
D
Click here for an
explanation of ratings.
from a response letter by David Habecker:
(CAUTION: Contains
many spoilers. Do not read if you have not seen the film.)
"I agree with some of what you say, but I
interpreted the movie a bit differently than you did.
True, there were some definite plot holes:
the whole
bit about how Tim Robbins managed to change his identity, and what really happened with his
old best friend was never really explained to my satisfaction, for example.
Did he deliberately kill his friend or just take gruesome advantage
of a real hunting accident? How did Jeff Bridges possibly manage to catch up
with the van at the end after his lengthy confrontation with Robbins? Could
someone ranting about a bomb really just crash a car through a barricade
into the FBI headquarters and not be gunned down before he'd gotten five
feet?
However, if I was willing to suspend disbelief a
little, I actually thought the film's end made up for some of its other flaws.
The bad guys actually win in this film, and Bridges'
character did not single-handedly save the day -- a striking departure from standard
Hollywood conventions, and not at all what I had been expecting! I did not think the
movie's point was to make people more paranoid, although other reviews I read tended to
agree with you on this. (The silly slogan "Fear thy neighbor" which appeared on
some of the movie's posters didn't help.)
I saw the film more as a sort of cautionary parable
about how someone can be destroyed (literally!) by giving in
to his deepest fears and
alienating the people around him.
Bridges was paranoid, suspecting his neighbor of
something although he really had nothing to go on, invading his privacy, taking advantage
of their friendship, alienating his girlfriend (Hope Davis,
whom I very much liked in The Daytrippers and Next Stop, Wonderland,
by the way), and straining his relationship with his son. The fact that his
suspicions in this case turned out to be true I thought was almost beside
the point.
Almost at
every stage of the movie, whenever Bridges would find out some little fact
about his friendly neighbor, he has a choice -- he can either succumb to his
darkest fears and sink deeper into them, or decide to trust. As Robbins
points out, at any point Bridges could have simply gone to his friend and
talked to him about his fears, seeking for some common-sense explanation for
his suspicions. Yes, the audience knows (at least anyone who has seen the
previews) that Robbins really is a terrorist, but the important point I
thought was that BRIDGES does not know. He is only speculating.
Even when Robbins came to him in his yard and confesses that he changed his name because
of a foolish act he had done in his youth, I felt his explanation was plausible enough
that Bridges should have realized how silly he was being. I am not advocating blind trust
when there are obvious danger signs, but the clues that Bridges was following were hardly
obvious, and the odds that he actually was onto a terrorist were astronomical -- hardly
the way someone should ordinarily live their life.
In the end, his paranoia helped nothing and only turned him into the agent of death and
destruction for the people at the FBI building, his girlfriend, and himself. The wages of
fear and mistrust of one's neighbor, the movie seemed to me to be saying,
are death.
It reminded
me a bit of your pastor's sermon back in January on Jesus' parable about the
weeds in the field which an enemy has sown, and how Jesus tells his
disciples that it is not their job to pull up the weeds, since in doing so
they might pull up the good plants as well. If one chooses to respond to the
all-too-real fact of evil in the world with fear and distrust of one's
neighbor (literally and figuratively), then the odds are that you will not
only fail to stop that evil, but also that the
evil will destroy you and those you love in the process. So in the end my
interpretation of what the movie was trying to say is just the opposite of
yours.
Granted, Arlington Road would hardly
make my list of Great Movies -- for one, I think the movie's point would have been all the
stronger if Bridges in fact had been imagining it all and he had been destroyed by his own
fear and suspicion alone (like the main character in Dostoevsky's story "The
Double," if you've read that, or some of the Twilight Zones
I've seen.)
Still, I was both
genuinely surprised and horrified by the film's denouement, and it left
me thinking long after I'd left the theater, which is more than I can
say for most movies I've seen this year so far.
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