Arlington Road

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These people have to live somewhere. Like the mass murderers who are finally discovered, with their neighbors interviewed in front of television cameras ("He seemed like a nice-enough guy . . . kind of quiet, kept to himself"), terrorists that Homeland Security say live in "cells" don't just have group condos specially designed for twisted Unibomber types. They live among us.

That's the chilling departure point for "Arlington Road." They could be right across the street. And they are. The way this is set up, from the beginning we suspect that Oliver Lang and his wife, Cheryl (Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack), are involved in something more than youth soccer or the PTA. But like those "Columbo" episodes where we learn the identity of the murderer in the opening sequence, the tension here comes from our seeing and knowing things before the hero does.

Ehren Kruger has written a simple yet effective screenplay that gives director Mark Pellington plenty of chances to reinforce the tension. In fact, you have great expectations for the film when the pre-title sequence is so strong. At first we see just feet crossing in front of each other, half-walking, half-staggering down the middle of a road. Then we see it's a boy. Then we see Michael Faraday (Jeff Bridges) behind the wheel and stopping his car to investigate and offer assistance. And then? From Faraday's point of view, we see the boy's bloody stump of a hand and realize he's in shock. After Faraday screams for help and no one comes out of their houses to assist, he speeds the boy off to the hospital. In this way, he comes to know neighbors he and his grad-student girlfriend, Brooke (Hope Davis) have virtually ignored since they moved into the neighborhood.

The heavy-handedness of the script becomes clear when we realize that a) Faraday's wife was an FBI agent who was killed in a botched raid that was based on faulty information, and b) the terrorists in the neighborhood just happened to move into a house directly across from the professor who teaches a course on terrorism at George Washington University.

Since Prof. Faraday still has issues with the FBI--blaming them for his wife's death and meeting with his wife's former co-agent (Robert Gossett) to find out whether she's still remembered--he actually might have been ripe for recruiting. But that's a direction Kruger chose not to go, and none of the characters are really developed beyond their function in the script. Instead, we get a pretty straightforward story that gives us obvious clue after clue. Lang says in conversation he's a graduate of Kansas State, but then Faraday sees misdirected, forwarded mail from a different university's alumni office addressed to his neighbor. Lang says he's an architect working on a shopping mall (hence all the blueprints scattered all over his house), but Faraday peeks at one and sees an office building instead. And when he decides to get yearbooks and pursue this thing further, he realizes that Lang is not who he says he is.

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