Arlington Road Reviews

Bloodied and disheveled, eyes glazed and one hand horribly mutilated, a 10-year-old boy staggers through a leafy Washington, DC, suburb until he's spotted by Michael Faraday (Jeff Bridges). Faraday whisks the child to a nearby emergency room, and later meets the boy's grateful parents, Oliver and Cheryl Lang (Tim Robbins, Joan Cusack), who turn out to live directly across the street. Isn't a shame that it takes a child's accident with some firecrackers to bring neighbors together? Beneath his placid, middle-class exterior, Faraday is a haunted man, a history professor who specializes in American terrorism and whose wife, an FBI agent, was killed in a botched raid that pointedly echoes the infamous Ruby Ridge fiasco. Faraday's blossoming friendship with the Langs, who also extend their welcome to his sweetly supportive girlfriend (Hope Davis) and small son, might be Faraday's ticket out of unhealthy isolation. Except he begins to suspect they're not what they seem: Is Faraday spiraling off the deep end, or are the genial Langs really part of some dangerous cabal with God-knows-what awful agenda? Mark Pellington's paranoid thriller gets off to a terrific start, creating an aura of vicious violence and mysterious menace through stylishly grim photography, jittery editing and the dreadful image of a wounded child. Pellington then systematically squanders all that carefully constructed atmosphere on a painfully conventional story. You know, the one where a lone eccentric stumbles onto something so big and horrifying that no one believes him. No one, that is, except the bad guys who see and know everything, including what goes on in the poor schmuck's head -- otherwise their scheming would be for naught. A successful thriller makes you forget such impossibilities, but here they poison every scene.