American Pie

by D. K. Holm

he customarily right wing anti-government activists now have their Clint Eastwood, except that Clint Eastwood already was their hero. In this case, it is Tim Robbins, as Oliver Lang. At least, that's his name this time. Next month it could be somthing else. He moves around a lot, you see. That's what you do when you give your life over to blowing up government office buildings.

Arlington Road is a bleak political thriller along the lines of The Parallax View, as every other commentator will mention, in that an investigator of a crime turns out to have been set up as the instigator of the next one. Made by a bunch of Hollywood liberals, it relishes imagining the right wing conspiracy as grand, well-organized, and well-funded (here the villains even operate a national delivery service, called Liberty, modelled along the lines of Federal Express).

It also suffers from the hobbling narrative constraints of liberal guilt. The hero, college professor Michael Faraday (Jeff Bridges), who lives in suburbia and teaches a class in right wing terrorism, is the one who suspects that his new neighbor, Lang, is an agent of death, but is compromised from action because he is still mourning the death of his wife, an F B I agent who died at a Ruby Ridge-style raid. It seems to me that the circumstances of his wife's death (the F B I was wrong about their suspect's activities) should spur him into joining, or at least sharing the views of, his enemies, but it is a measure of the political confusion of this film that it fails to segregate its lines of thought, or intelligently show how they might resemble each other.

irector Mark Pellington (Going All the Way) supervises as Bridges and Robbins and Joan Cusack, as Robbins's wife, give decent performances, although Bridges turn smacks a bit too much of his passive manner in movies such as See You in the Morning. But then, that's the point. Democracy is a good thing, but you know, if we just tinkered with the constitution a little bit, we could undermine it enough to be able to spy on our neighbors enough to keep everyone in line. No one ever took the first amendment seriously anyway, did they? Had Faraday been more vigilent, less wrapped up in his own sorrow, perhaps disaster would not have struck again. Credited screenwriter Ehren Kruger (Scream 3, Reindeer Games), however, has not balanced the political side of his text with the horror side. He relies on horror tropes, and what could be called the Oliver Stone Principle, which is that the girlfriend or wife (here Hope Davis) is going to be unpleasantly skeptical and argumentative, which we the audience know she is wrong, until it is too late for her. Kruger handles the horror aspects like a pro, even if it is a hack pro, but stumbles over the political landscape, which is far too complex to be fit into this context. Instead he relies on received opinion, on the MSNBC assumptions of what the radical antigovernment elements are really up to. We don't really learn anything about them; instead we are instructed that they are more dangerous than we imagined. It is elements such as these that tilt what could have been an effective thriller into irresponsibility.

For full cast and credits for Arlington Road, visit the Internet Movie Data Base.

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