The 1988 movie "Arlington Road" is a scary movie in the best sense: it makes you think. Starring Jeff Bridges and Tim Robbins, and featuring Joan Cusack and Hope Davis, that makes four amazing actors in one film. This film was shot before Robbins' best supporting Oscar and Bridges best actor Oscar. They are in a "little" movie that should have gotten a lot more attention, but the subject matter was too dicey to play widely.
Bridges is a college Professor Michael Faraday who is struggling with his grief over the death of his FBI agent wife killed by a right wing group. He's trying to raise his boy alone, and when new neighbors move in who are super friendly and embrace the son into their family, he is initially happy. But something is fishy: the couple Oliver and Cheryl Lang (Robbins and Cusack) , seem to get creepier and creepier. Have Faraday's obsessions with cult groups from the murder of his wife tipped him over into paranoia and madness? His girlfriend (Davis) tries to calm him down, until one day she sees something that makes her suspicious as well. It's a roller coaster of revelations that spirals at warp speed into tragedy. I can't tell you more. But the stranger down the street motif is the stuff of real life headlines, and our fear is not in question after the Boston marathon bombing and other similar plots. Who is nice and friendly? What does that tell us about the people around us? Nothing.
It's a fun dip into our own paranoia and conspiracy theories. But after the film is over, you sit there thinking of how little we know others or ourselves, in a world turned upside down. This film is way before 9/11, but it's worth watching as a mediation on our states of mind after. Now we are constantly asked to report suspicious characters at airports, inform on others, and prepare for the worst. What has our post 9/11 world done to us inside?
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