Product Description

WIDOWED WHEN HIS FBI AGENT WIFE IS KILLED BY A RIGHT-WING GROUP, COLLEGE PROFESSOR MICHAEL FARADAY BECOMES OBSESSED WITH THE CULTURE OF THESE GROUPS, ESPECIALLY WHEN HIS NEW NEIGHBORS, THE ALL-AMERICAN OLIVER AND CHERYL LANG, START ACTING SUSPICIOUSLY. WITH EACH TWIST THE MYSTERY DEEPENS AND THE QUESTION LOOMS.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14999 in DVD
• Brand: Sony
• Released on: 1999-10-26
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
• Formats: Anamorphic, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DVD, NTSC, Widescreen
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 117 minutes

Amazon.com
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

From The New Yorker
Jeff Bridges spends most of this movie looking extremely worried, and so would you if you thought a major American terrorist had moved in across the street. Bridges plays a college lecturer, specializing in terrorism, who befriends a neighbor couple named the Langs (Tim Robbins and an even scarier Joan Cusack); the question is whether they are befriending him back or using him for evil purposes. Mark Pellington's paranoid movie tends to state its intentions too baldly, and his evident desire to contribute to the debate over America's self-inflicted wounds seems like wishful thinking; but the film is undoubtedly creepy (the first ten minutes, in particular, are tough to watch), and most of the shocks strike home. What will divide viewers is the plot; either the ending makes no sense or it forces you to rethink everything that went before. At least the moral of the picture is unambiguous: if you want to live, don't look in other people's mailboxes. -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

CAUTION! This is a cautionary tale, not a "feel-good" movie
This one kept me riveted throughout; I swear I didn't exhale until the last five minutes. No, I didn't see the ending coming, but it makes absolute sense given the ficton created therein (Roger Ebert is full of PRUNES when he says that it "flies apart in the last 30 minutes;" it not only works, it's the only way the film CAN end and maintain its integrity). The performances are spot-on (including Joan Cusack; hello? The woman is allowed to do something other than "zany" roles-- especially when she does so damned well with a role like this one), the plot is complex and yes, far-fetched, but pulls you in and keeps you in a stranglehold. But as I titled my review, do NOT watch this movie if you have to see good conquer evil/hope springs eternal etc.-- you WON'T LIKE IT. It is good drama, an excellent thriller, and while the nods to Ruby Ridge (NOT Waco,as has been suggested) and Oklahoma City made it timely when it was released, the events of 9-11-01 make it even more disturbing now. Remember, when we believe these acts to be the acts of individuals, acting alone, it only helps us to regain our sense of security; the truth may be more than we can bear.

A breathtaking thriller
Arlington road is an excellent thriller. Suspens never stops until the very end that is just amazing.

After watching Arlington Road you might think differently about this quotation :
"Freedom is just a hallucination created by a pathological lack of paranoia."

Anyway, without any hesitation I give 5 stars to this excellent movie.

Realistic and Shocking!
This is a movie that I think everyone should watch. We watched it some years ago and several times since. Everytime, it is impactful. I started thinking about this movie recently when reading about more terror propaganda in the UK. I was reminded of an article in the papers that described one of the 7/7 bombers as just a "normal, average guy" who had a regular job and loved soccer, "just like many other young Britons, his neighbors said".

That really hits home when you watch Arlington Road. Everybody should be aware that THEY, too, can be manipulated to "carry the bomb into the building." The references to Ruby Ridge and The OK bombing in the movie reflect the time it was made/released, but it is even more meaningful after 911.

The movie may seem to begin a bit slowly - that was my initial impression - and it was only afterward that I realized that this was a perfect metaphor for how "normal life" can totally mask what is really going on. But don't worry, it soon grabs you by the throat and doesn't let you go until the final, horrifying revelations at the end.

Jeff Bridges plays his part very well - a guy so blinded by emotion that he is putty in the hands of cold-blooded manipulators. Bridges (as the hero) thinks he's got a handle on what's going on, but in fact, this is hubris. One could say the same for most "conspiracy theorists." You only know what "they" want you to know or figure out.

Some people think the plot is too complex, too far-fetched, but I think that's not the case. You don't need much imagination to see how such an elaborate set-up could easily be achieved in anyone's life. There are plenty of movies that talk about that aspect of things. The only thing is, they all make it seem like such dramatic, high adventure, that we forget that it is the mundane, the ordinary, the ho-hum existence, that veils truly evil things.

The psychological slamming is all there at the end and that's exactly it; how it MUST be in real life. Life is so "ordinary, so boring, so tedious, so commonplace, that it lulls us into complacency. And that is undoubtedly what the filmmaker was trying to convey... that sense of ordinariness, mundane life that covers another reality of conspiracy and evil-doing.

For example, only AFTER the end of the movie do you realize that the bleeding kid at the beginning was all part of the set-up, that the terrorist/parents actually used their own child as bait, and even caused a severe injury to the child in order to make that bait more compelling. Was the kid brain-washed or terrorized? Probably. What kind of monsters would do that to a child?

And that makes the final scene even more chilling, where the terrorists stand there in front of the house for sale and wear their "mask of sanity," saying the world is getting too scary...

Yes, the good guys die and the bad guys continue on... but then, isn't that reality?