Just got in from seeing Arlington Rd.
What a sad state of affairs. The opening of this film is
excellent. Unfortunately it's over in five minutes and you're
stuck having to watch the rest of this limping beast.
Jeff Bridges spends the entire movie looking like a vagrant who
just woke up in an alley. Usually this quality of his is
endearing and sexy but in this film with his terminal case of
slack mouth he resembles nothing so much as a lunatic at the end
of a bad bender....unless it's a Grouper.
As a professor at a prestigious college who teaches a course on
terrorism and as the widower of an FBI agent who specialized in
such cases Bridges character is really not very bright. He rants
and raves giving away his suspicions and generally doing
everything in his power to draw attention to himself except wear
a flashing neon sign that says "I know all about your
terrorist activites!!"
Meanwhile Tim Robbins and Joan Cusak could have been cut and
pasted from the cult-classic 'Parents' to say nothing of their
Children of the Damned offspring.
You never know WHY these people oppose the government. Robbins is
just a maniac with a vendetta surrounded by other loons and
somehow they are devious enough and smart enough to perpetrate
heinous crimes and get away scott-free time and again.
Arlington Rd is long on melodramatic lighting, loud panting from
Bridges and "almost" glimpses of information that might
be interesting and engaging but it never delivers on the promises
it seems to make. You learn nothing about anything.
Then I have to look at the whole film again after seeing how it
ends----I knew about halfway through what that end would be-----and
I try to see if maybe I just misunderstood the intention of the
film. While that is possible I still think they really didn't
know what kind of film they wanted to make or exactly which issue
they wanted to focus on or which story they wanted to tell. In
the end it's a horrid waste of talent----although Hope Davis
gives a good performance and her character is well written until
the very end when all characters become cutouts to move around
for the sole purpose of ending the movie with some "action".
