It starts out as a condemnation of sprawl (at one point, a character even snarls, "How do you like living in your godless suburban world?" -- oddly enough, he's a right-wing conspirator, not an urban-living liberal). Illustrating the isolating effects of sprawling, cookie-cutter housing developments, Jeff Bridges lives in a typical suburb of Washington, DC, yet he doesn't even know the name of the family across the street. And really, he would have been better off not knowing, because it turns out that under their preternaturally perky exterior, they're anarchic wackos. And when the movie dives into the whole terrorism thing, it dives into lunacy as well. I mean, Stephen and I were laughing out loud. We were the only ones in the theater laughing, actually, so maybe it was just us.
Arlington Road is a paean to paranoia, a celebration of suspicion. Instead of "Keep watching the skies!" it urges us to "Keep watching your neighbors." I'm hard-pressed to adequately describe how totally ridiculous it is -- you would have to see it to believe me, and really, you don't want to do that.
This film features an interesting twist, though: usually, it's the movie that's good and the ending that sucks. In Arlington Road, the movie sucks, but the ending is great. Too bad the preceeding two hours couldn't live up to the last 10 minutes, as Stephen put it.
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