nan | 楠木

Another film to feed your paranoia. Arlington Road, for the most part, is conventional and uninspiring, but it does benefit from a climatic twist and Jeff Bridges’ convincing performance.

The plot follows Michael Faraday (Jeff Bridges), a history professor who’s obsessed with extremism in America (he teaches a course called American Terrorism). He befriends his new neighbors, the Lang family (Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack), after saving their son Brady in an accident. However, Faraday gradually becomes suspicious of Lang, after discovering a series of lies. His friends tell him he’s just paranoid, but of course that’s not the case here – otherwise what’s the point of the film.

All this is of course nothing groundbreaking. The whole film feels very run-of-the-mill, but the production quality is on par. Jeff Bridges does a good enough job building out a decent (albeit standardized) character – the traumatized person who has suffered a loss (his wife).

As mentioned before, the film has a rather good twist at the very end, and this gives the film a good breath of creativity. However, this ending seems particularly haunting, if you consider that this film was made pre-9/11 – some of the images certainly invoked memories of that tragic day.

7/10