A Dead-End Street

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

The thinly fictionalized references to recent bloody events--Ruby Ridge, the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City, even kids playing with explosives--are transparent. (Release of the movie was delayed to separate it from the Columbine tragedy.) But Arlington Road is not a cheesy exploitation film. Nor is it a routine paranoid thriller featuring drooling perps of the easy-to-deny sort. It wants to be seen as a sober, thoughtful contemplation of domestic terrorism. It also wants us to think there is more of it around, and hiding in fairly plain sight, than we would like to believe.

How far one wants to go along its chosen path probably depends on the state of one's mental health. That of professor Michael Faraday (Jeff Bridges) is pretty shaky when we encounter him. He has recently lost his wife, an FBI agent, in a shoot-out that should never have happened. He's also not exactly a model of scholarly dispassion as he teaches a course in the politics of terror, while more than half convinced that there are more and larger conspiracies at work in our world than anyone is admitting. The movie is, indeed, rather good on the erratic way officialdom sometimes overestimates, sometimes underestimates the threat of organized terror in modern life and how that poses a threat to civil comity.

What Ehren Kruger's script doesn't do so well is suspensefully build Faraday's suspicions about his new neighbors, Oliver and Cheryl Lang (Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack), and their creepy kids. There's always something eerie about Robbins' geniality--in his screen persona he's never been a guy from whom a sensible person would buy a used car--and almost from the outset you agree with Faraday that he and his kin are surely up to something distinctly antisocial. One-two-three, Faraday acquires the evidence suggesting that Oliver has taken over another man's identity and is almost certainly a quietly mad bomber. The cautionary notes struck by Faraday's new girlfriend (Hope Davis) and old FBI friend (Robert Gossett) seem purely conventional and very likely a signal that they're not going to survive to the end of the movie.

Mark Pellington's jittery direction is not much help in establishing the false calm out of which true suspense might be built. He's one of those music-video refugees for whom you want to take up a collection so he can add a tripod and an editing machine with a functioning Pause button to his filmmaking arsenal.

But despite its mannerisms and one of those where-are-the-cops-when-you- need-them car chases through downtown Washington, Arlington Road comes to a conclusion as lugubrious as it is surprising. It really doesn't earn its messy, crudely ironic ending, however. The ability of terrorism to rend cruelly the vulnerable skin of our civility is its most commonly remarked-upon quality. But that does not mean it is as pervasive, intricately organized and irresistible as this breathlessly striving movie makes it out to be.

--R.S.