The 1999 Jeff Bridges movie that became a political minefield: “Putting the attention on the wrong spot”
Throughout his long and accomplished career, Jeff Bridges has played some truly standout characters.
One of his most fascinating roles comes from Mark Pellington’s 1999 film Arlington Road, which sees the Oscar-winning star play Michael Faraday, a history professor who is initially welcoming towards his new neighbours. However, he quickly suspects that Oliver, played by Tim Robbins, and Cheryl, played by Joan Cusack, might actually be terrorists, so he teams up with his dead wife’s ex-partner in the FBI, Robert Gossett’s character, to try and uncover the truth.
Ehren Kruger, who would go on to be nominated for an Oscar for his work on Top Gun: Maverick, won the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Nicholl Fellowship in 1996, which helped the film get made, and Bridges was initially drawn to it because of its dynamite script.
“I love movies where the filmmakers are ahead of you,” Bridges told The Guardian, “You don’t have it all figured out. Arlington Road is like that. The script was a page-turner”.
Unfortunately, not everyone was as enthusiastic; the film’s ending was massively divisive, which shows Michael being framed for the bomb blast orchestrated by Oliver and Cheryl, in which he dies, while the actual perpetrators slither back into the shadows. Arlington Road was released at a time when tension surrounding domestic terrorism in America was at an all-time high. Kruger actually based the script on this feeling, citing the Waco siege and Oklahoma City bombings as sources of inspiration.
Alongside its controversial subject matter, Arlington Road also featured a lot of graphic violence, and the stars were forced to defend themselves and their work, as outlined in a different Guardian article. “When [US President Bill] Clinton says he wants Hollywood to take more responsibility for violence in films… I’m all for that,” said Robbins, “But he’s not a man to talk when he’s bombing villages.” As for Bridges, he took a more general approach to the issue.
“By focusing on the artists, you are putting the attention on the wrong spot,” he claimed, “Where the attention ought to be is in the political arena”.
The question of whether violence in media causes violence in real life is a long and thorny one. A number of movies have been straight-up banned for the acts of aggression depicted on screen, while entire mediums such as video games are under constant scrutiny. While it’s easy to sit on your high horse and claim that any well-adjusted person would know the difference between fact and fiction, the truth of the matter is that several real-life murders have been directly linked to pieces of cinema.
The team behind Arlington Road went to extreme lengths to protect themselves, including filming an alternative ending that was never going to be used. Unfortunately, this didn’t work, and the movie was still dragged through the mud. There’s a case to be made that, by simply sparking the debate around movie violence, the film did its job, which probably wasn’t much comfort to Bridges at the time, but the point still stands.
