Amazon.com video review:
It's easy to understand why Arlington Road sat on the studio
shelf for nearly a year. No, the film isn't awful; rather, it's an
extremely edgy and ultimately bleak thriller that offers no clear-cut
heroes or villains. In other words, Hollywood had no idea how to sell
it. Director Mark Pellington's underrated directorial debut, Going
All the Way, suffered the same fate, essentially because the
filmmaker's presentation of suburban America often shifts dramatically
within the same film. Characters are usually miserable and bordering on meltdown, no situation is straightforward, and things usually end
badly. Arlington Road begins as an astute study of suburban
paranoia. Michael Faraday (a face-pinched Jeff Bridges, who spends most
of the film on the brink of tears) is a college professor who teaches
American history courses on terrorism. He's been a conspiracy freak
since his wife, an FBI agent, was killed during a botched raid that
feels like a thinly fictionalized reference to the Waco tragedy. After
saving the life of his next-door neighbor's child, he initially
befriends the family (Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack), but soon believes
the husband is a terrorist. The first half of the film mocks Faraday: he
has no real evidence and is not the most stable of protagonists.
Despite the fact that it was government paranoia that got his wife
killed, Faraday repeats the same type of behavior. Pellington shifts
gears in the second half, however, and for awhile, it seems that the
film has simultaneously sunk into a cheap, high-octane brand of
Hollywood entertainment and undermined its own point. Arlington
Road, though, possesses a stunning ending that's a real gut punch,
one that may leave you needing a second viewing to catch all of its
smartly executed setup. --Dave McCoy
