Jeff Bridges stars, playing a character blessed with the movie-riffic name of Michael Faraday, a recently widowed Washington, D.C. college professor now raising a teenage son all by himself on the titular suburban street. Faraday is depressed, paranoid about the circumstances under which his FBI agent wife was killed, and he lectures his students on the eerie relevance of conspiracy theories.
Life begins to take a more positive turn when Faraday befriends new neighbors Oliver and Cheryl Lang (Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack), who arrive on Arlington Road with smiles and cheer. The neighbors bond over cookouts and intimate conversations, but of course circumstances quickly begin to change. The Langs become peculiar and occasionally dishonest in otherwise innocent conversation, and they make the very convenient mistake of leaving mysterious blueprints lying where an obsessed neighbor could strain to see them. Faraday is that neighbor, and his conspiracy-driven mind investigates the troubling history of his seemingly ideal neighbors.
The film unfolds as a series of wannabe-thought-provoking conversations about government secrecy and suburban paranoia that take place mostly in lighting so dim we can barely make out the characters. I guess that was director Mark Pellington's idea of strong visual style. Ditto his predilection toward framing about 60 percent of the film's scenes through doorways, for which there is literally no other explanation than the director thought it would look important. The film's pretentious visual sense becomes distractingly repetitive, wearing itself thin almost as quickly as the story itself, which starts as mildly intriguing, then becomes confusing, eventually tiresome, and finally laugh- (or anger-) inducing.
The actors do what they can with literally impossible material. Bridges is effective in a challenging role; he's a true believer who must first deal with the fact that his instincts may be totally wrong, and then fight his skepticism when he discovers his paranoia may not have been unfounded. Robbins strikes the right balance of wholesome, neighborly innocence and conspiratorial menace. Cusack always seems a little off-kilter, which works perfectly for a role in which she must be disturbingly sweet, to the point where the evil starts seeping through her smile.
Of course, acting would never be a problem in a film so manipulatively scripted down to the last detail. Sure, the performances are fine, but the characters are subject to a plot that sees them not as people but as slavishly organized story props. Worse still, there is no genuine or believable human action taken in the entire film -- every scenario takes place at the mercy of a screenplay that says it must. Ehren Kruger gets 'written by' credit on Arlington Road, and a brief look at his subsequent resume (Reindeer Games, The Skeleton Key, Blood and Chocolate) is explanation enough for the material's labyrinthine egomania.
One need not be a disbelieving curmudgeon to reject the absurdity of Arlington Road. Does the government deliberately hide certain secrets from its citizens? Sure. Might there be some conspiracies that turn out to be completely accurate? Of course. Would an exaggerated form of conspiratorial intrigue work in a psychological thriller? Without a doubt. But this film is so fascinated by the potential of its subject matter that it leaves rationality and common sense at the door. There is nothing wrong with suspending disbelief, but Arlington Road forces the audience to break off their disbelief and throw it in the trash can.
Peeping Jeff.
