Arlington Road Understood That the Conspiracy Cannot Be Punched
Even if it didn't really understand the conspirators
Michael: We don’t want others. We want one name, and we want it fast, because it gives us our security back. We can say, “Here was the one man unlike the rest of us. We’ve named him, and he’s no more. And his reasons, they’re gone, too.”
The years before us are going to be full, again, with the much-maligned “diner story,” those tedious features from coastal daily papers that task a reporter with going out into the great hinterlands of the United States and interviewing the regular folks who live there about why they keep voting for a political party whose plain and inarguable platform (to the extent it even has one anymore) is that the government should not govern, and that only white people are really American.
The reason these articles keep getting written is because most reporters at big traditional media are white people, and increasingly they are at a loss as to why their fellow white people are so ill-informed, so extremist, so impenetrable to reason. They go out in search of some answer to this, unwilling to see the obvious, which is that this stuff has been preached to them within a closed ecosystem of schools, media and religious organizations that reinforce complete nuttery. That would require interrogating what it is about our national character that has allowed this circus to thrive.
Arlington Road is a late ’90s thriller about mid-’90s conspiracies, the sort of competently written, staged and acted mid-list movie that seems like it is going to wrap up nicely, with easy answers and a shadowy cabal of bad guys exposed and stopped. Then (spoiler alert) that does not happen, because its hero fundamentally misjudges what is going on.
Michael Faraday (Jeff Bridges) is a professor who lectures on the topic of domestic terrorism at a beltway college, a man whose wife, we learn, was an FBI agent who died in a field during a Waco-style misunderstanding that resulted in a family of unhinged loners dying and taking a bunch of federal agents with them. He reveals this to us in fits and starts as the film follows his budding friendship with Oliver (Tim Robbins), who’s living right across the street from Faraday but who he only meets after rushing Oliver’s son to the hospital. The movie opens as Faraday discovers the teen boy staggering down the street, bloodied from an apparent accident involving fireworks.
Guilty over not knowing their family better, Faraday starts encouraging friendships between his son (Spencer Treat Clark) and Oliver’s kid, and between Oliver’s wife (Joan Cusack) and his own girlfriend Brooke (Hope Davis). It’s only after a few sleepovers and late nights chatting politics around the dinner table that Faraday starts noticing glaring inconsistencies in Oliver’s claims about his work—and a simmering undercurrent of anti-government sentiment that seems matched by his son’s insistence that his pillow fort is a “compound.”
Digging further into his neighbor’s past reveals what we suspect: that Oliver is not who he says he is, that he’s stolen someone’s identity, that the architectural plans in his house aren’t for an addition on the local mall but are an office building, and that when he was 16 he was collared for trying to set off a bomb because the government stole his father’s farmland. (In one of the most prescient details, the culprit is specifically the Bureau of Land Management, the very same group with which Ammon Bundy was beefing when, in 2016, he and several other gun-toting people seized the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge and for the next 40 days engaged in the most pathetic standoff with federal agents in memory.)
