ARLINGTON ROAD

-By Peter Henn

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Good thrillers push the boundary of common sense, great ones overstep it. Arlington Road, directed by Mark Pellington, belongs to the first kind, at most. Instead of creating a disturbing world unto itself, familiar but with its own kind of rhythms and interactions, Arlington Road tries to connect with the reality we recognize and have suspicions and inklings about. Yet it also introduces stylizations that hint at making its Washington, D.C. setting a parallel but entirely different universe from the one we know. The oddities don't add up to a fantasy environment, though, and their appearance strains the plotlines. Pellington pulls out a suspense movie that has some panache and confidence, but he needed to have decided from the beginning whether he was going to go for normalcy at its extraordinary limit, or a fantasy with its own guidelines.

Michael Farraday (Jeff Bridges) first encounters his neighbors across the street in a freak moment. Driving home from his teaching post at George Washington University, Michael spots a boy running along the street who is injured and obviously confused, whisks him into his car, and rushes him to the nearest hospital. Saving the youngster, Brady (Mason Gamble), sets in motion Michael meeting his parents, Cheryl (Joan Cusack) and Oliver Lang (Tim Robbins). Once the child is out of danger, Michael introduces them to his own boy, Grant (Spencer Clark), and his current girlfriend, Brooke (Hope Davis). A good deed like his might have resulted in a neighborly handshake, thank-you card or barbeque invitation, and then a return to leading separate lives. Instead, a friendship develops between Brady and Grant, which pulls the two couples closer together.

But Michael, perhaps motivated to know the household of his son's new playmate, can't quite figure these people out, and his professional inquisitiveness gets a hold on him. Oliver poses as an architect, yet blueprints at his home are clearly for an office building, not a mall as he told Michael. The more the teacher delves into Oliver's background, the more dirt, or deception, he finds. Gradually, Oliver begins to appear to Michael as a dangerous anti-government nut--but that could be his delusion, as Brooke points out to him, because Michael's academic specialty is domestic terrorism, which in turn was spurred by his wife's murder by a political separatist a number of years ago. Yet, even factoring in those considerations, he believes he has justifiable cause, and some breaking evidence, to go on.

Though Arlington Road means to be a study in the appearances of families, the two women are disposable (one of them literally), and the story with few changes could have been pared down to a tidier, one-to-one conflict of intellects between Michael and Oliver. Pellington also tends to punch through plot development in a schematic way: For instance, one scene introduces the idea that Michael has good skeptical skills, and the very next shows him applying skepticism in his classroom, to underscore the previous point. Events and the disclosure of traits don't truly weave together, but much of the time only crudely lie end on end.

Moreover, Michael's personal history, devised to show us that his hunches about Oliver could be wrong, is unlikely and convoluted, to say the least; some other grounds for implanting misgivings about him should have been drawn up. Yet that problem ties together with the film's tugs away from the realism that is its premise, and toward occurrences that have no reasonable explanation. Both Oliver and Cheryl showing up at times and places where Michael and Brooke least want them to be, suddenly, isn't poetic, and doesn't establish the film as a fantasy or the Langs as supernatural agents of evil; it's just plain hokey. Bridges puts on his typical, easygoing masculinity, but his part is nowhere near as fun as his last film role was in The Big Lebowski. Pellington imparts an alert, sensuous feeling to the images and makes a sleek, advantageous use of wide-screen, and Conrad Buff, James Cameron's regular editor, helps to find a cutting pace that is never pummeling, lumbering or missing a beat. The film has a glossy, enjoyable surface, if not too much else.

	--Peter Hennƒ