WhatzUp

Arlington Road
by Derek Neff

My nomination for the worst movie trailer of all time would go to the one they made for Arlington Road. If the trend toward making commercials that give away not just the basic premise of the movie, but that reveal the entire arc of the story from beginning to end, wasn't invented by the makers of Arlington Road, it was certainly perfected by them. Why Hollywood feels it is necessary to leave no stone unturned in the media blitz that precedes a motion picture even as bleak and potentially suspenseful as Arlington Road is beyond me, though it probably has to do with their not respecting the audience enough to leave anything to chance.

What you may already know about Arlington Road is already way too much, but I'll give the synopsis here, in a nutshell, and hope you've forgotten the rest: Jeff Bridges plays a college professor whose FBI agent wife was killed in a Ruby Ridge-type debacle a year earlier, becomes suspicious of his next-door-neighbor(Tim Robbins), after he catches him in a couple of inexplicable lies and then notices the architectural plans to what looks like a Federal office building in his house. The more he learns about his neighbor, the more convinced he is that he might be a domestic terrorist, despite his attempts at friendship.

It's a nice set-up, and director Mark Pellington, working from a screenplay by Ehran Kruger, gives the whole movie a stylish, paranoid, well-crafted feel. Arlington Road alternates between being a conventional Hollywood thriller and a darkly subversive film with teeth. That Arlington Road manages to catch one genuinely off-guard, even after seeing the trailer, is the real surprise.