Arlington Road

Arlington Road

“Arlington Road” is a conspiracy thriller that starts strong, makes some good points, and then jumps the tracks during its last half hour. The climax is so implausible we stop caring and start scratching our heads. Then later, thinking back through the film, we realize it wasn’t just the ending that was cuckoo. Given the logic of the ending, the entire film has to be rethought; this is one of those movies where at first all seems fine and then you realize they’re living their own lives but actually they’re strapped into a hidden plot.

In an era when movies were made with more care and didn’t insult their audiences’ intelligence on purpose, hard questions would have been asked at the screenplay level and rewrites might have made this story more believable. But no. Watching “Arlington Road,” I got the uneasy feeling that it was made by people who live entirely in the moment who gape at an energy of a scene without asking how it connects to what went before or comes after. It’s a movie for “Groundhog Day”; it exists in the eternal present.

Jeff Bridges stars as Michael Faraday, a professor of terrorism (no smiles, please), whose late wife was an FBI agent shot dead in a botched raid. Hitchcock would have given him ordinary guyhood and contrasted it with his weirdly plotted entrapment; but as a professor he gets to shoehorn info into lectures as he narrates slide shows and takes field trips.

Faraday believes most strongly that big terrorist events are not carried out by isolated loners. We see photos of a federal building blown up in St. Louis; he has doubts about whether one man acting alone could have done all that damage before dying in explosion: “We don’t want others,” he tells his students. “We want one man, and we want him fast it gives us our security back.”

As the film opens, he sees an injured kid wandering in the street; rushes him to an ER; later finds out he’s the son of some folks who’ve moved in across the way: Oliver and Cheryl Lang (Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack). Faraday and his girlfriend, a grad student with movie name of the year Brooke Wolfe (Hope Davis), become friendly with the Langs. But then Faraday who as we all know is bound to have a streak of paranoia or two starts picking up little signals that they’re hiding something.

His investigation into Lang’s background is hard to accept because it depends on vast coincidences. (After he finds an old newspaper article about Lang on Internet, he goes to library and looks up same material on old-fashioned microfilm, so Lang can come up behind him and see what he’s reading.) To be fair, some of these implausibilities can be explained once it’s over and you think back through whole plot.

But let’s put aside the plot for now. What about the big physical details of those final thriller scenes? How can anyone even skilled conspirators predict with such precision that a car crash will be the outcome? That a man would go to a certain pay phone at a certain time so he could see a particular truck he needs to see? How can you accurately anticipate what security guards will do?

It seems dangerous to count on police not stopping a car speeding recklessly through a downtown area as the linchpin for your entire plan of action. This is where “Arlington Road” falls apart completely, even though there is an ironic payoff and yes, the movie’s underlying points will give you something to think about. But was there no way to take those insights and these well-drawn, well-acted characters and put them into a movie that didn’t leave audiences squirming in disbelief?”

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