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On the other hand, fans of intelligent thrillers, who’ve recently had to put up with such misguided entries as Instinct and The General’s Daughter, finally get something more compelling in the chilling, tautly directed Arlington Road. Jeff Bridges plays Michael Faraday, history professor at a West Virginia university. Since his FBI agent wife was killed during a Ruby Ridge-style incident in which the Bureau was mistakenly investigating a somewhat paranoid but criminally innocent gun collector, he’s been obsessed with researching domestic terrorism, working the subject into his courses. Through circumstances established in the gripping opening sequence, he gets better acquainted with some new neighbors, Cheryl and Oliver Lang (Joan Cusack, looking even more ominous than she did in Addams Family Values, and Tim Robbins, whose character seems too much like his Bob Roberts for comfort), but soon begins to suspect they’re part of a group planning some catastrophic event in nearby Washington. As the tension level climbs, the audience is pulled back and forth between sympathy for Michael, and the fear that maybe his irrational preoccupation is fueling his fears like gasoline on the grill.
This is the sort of thing whose details I don’t want to divulge, since it uncorks a couple major twists, including one at the end that might mess you up for a week. Suffice it to say that Arlington Road, directed by Mark Pellington (who did the masterful but unfortunately titled -- in light of the previous review -- post-Korean War drama Going All the Way) from a script by first-time writer Ehren Kruger, quickly slithers into your skull, invited by an eerie montage of images (set to music by “Twin Peaks” composer Angelo Baldamente) that dissolves into the visceral opening sequence, and proceeds to worm its way down your spine and hang on for two hours until a breathless climax. Pellington is a rarity contrasted with the current TV commercial-bred crop of slick auteurs, using an excellent cast to create a more difficult, but more rewarding, level of psychological tension via fewer scenes of action or violence. At the same time he takes on a timely, thought-provoking subject without preaching or taking sides. As Faraday observes to his students regarding the apparently incongruous spread of homegrown politically inspired violence during a healthy economy, “What’s that going to mean when prosperity fades?” B+
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