Rewatching Arlington Road (1999) for the first time in over twenty years is a weird trip. The film is a seventies-style paranoid conspiracy thriller for its era, intimating all the dark subtext that genre requires. But the United States has undergone such a deranged transformation since then, it makes the nineties look positively innocent. Or perhaps that was its point? Are we living in some twisted version of the societal sickness this movie suggested was out there?
Michael Faraday (Jeff Bridges) — and yes, the name is intentional — is a widowed political science professor who teaches classes about extremist terrorism. He also happens to have been married to an FBI agent who died during a botched raid that has left him with psychological scars. One day, Michael comes across a boy in the street with a severe arm injury, and races him to the hospital. Saving the kid’s life brings him into the orbit of the boy’s parents, Oliver Lang (Tim Robbins) and his wife Cheryl (Joan Cusack). Oliver and Cheryl seem like ordinary suburban neighbors, and at first, Michael embraces the new friendship, especially since it provides his own son with a nearby playmate. But Michael soon grows suspicious of this too-good-to-be-true family, and, propelled by his haunted past and conspiratorial mindset, he becomes obsessed with them, convinced they’re up to no good.
Arlington Road seemed more clever and clockwork the first time around, which is unsurprising; even having forgotten most of its details over the years, my experience watching it now was likely colored by vague memories of its trajectory, not to mention a significantly increased familiarity with the tricks and tropes of the genre. Still, if it feels a bit generically rote, it’s classily produced, nicely shaped, and well performed. Bridges brings his usual commanding presence to his tortured hero, while Robbins and Cusack make for first-rate wolves in sheep’s clothing. Hope Davis also makes a welcome appearance in what’s a fairly thankless but well executed girlfriend role. Cinematically speaking, it does capture a certain cockeyed visual and thematic aesthetic, reminiscent of everything from The Parallax View to Shadow of a Doubt. Newcomers, though, are likely to marvel at its pre-9/11 political backdrop, which delivers a premise that in the moment must have felt fantastical, but in retrospect feels a little…backwards? Today, now that the dangerous calls are coming from inside the (white) house, a conspiracy thriller about a widespread external domestic threat seems downright bizarre. Then again, Arlington Road’s main point seems to have been that the prosperous, comfortable status quo of the late nineties in America wasn’t quite as safe and peachy as it was cracked up to be — and given the historical record since then, maybe it was onto something.
