History Film / ArlingtonRoad

-->"Everyone here has clearance! [[spoiler:Everyone, [[HeroWithBadPublicity except you]]."

* DownerEnding: [[spoiler:And how! Michael, Whit, and almost two-hundred others die in the bombing of the J. Edgar Hoover Building, and Michael is posthumously framed for the attack by the actual culprits, the Lang's, who get away with everything. Michael's failure also means Dean Scobee's name remains besmirched. Grant survives, but now his would-be stepmother and his father have both died, and he now has to live with relatives, never knowing his father was framed and wrongly living with the stigma of being the son of the man responsible for the worst terrorist attack in American history.]]

* DownerBeginning: The movie begins with Michael coming across Oliver's son walking down the middle of the road in a daze [[{{Finger}} with a shredded hand]] as a result of a firecracker mishap. He then tries with his might to rush him to a hospital.

* DownerBeginning: [[spoiler:The terrorist's son has burned his hand off a few minutes before the opening sequence with a fire-cracker and is nearly run over by the professor, walking down the road in a daze with a shredded hand]].

* RayOfHopeEnding: A deleted scene that follows the FBI bombing implies that Grant knows his father was framed by the Langs. While this is not enough to prove Michael's innocence, it offers some consolation that Grant knows his father wasn't a murderer.

The movie stars Creator/JeffBridges as a history professor at George Washington University who is an expert on domestic terrorism, and whose wife died in a failed FBI mission some years earlier. He has a young son, a girlfriend (played by Hope Davis) and keeps in touch with his wife's former FBI partner, played by Robert Gossett. One day he begins to suspect his next-door neighbors (played by Creator/TimRobbins and Creator/JoanCusack) to be terrorists, based on a number of incidents that have occurred around them, including their son being hospitalized after an accident involving a firecracker. Nobody will believe him though, finding his ideas crazy and paranoid, pointing the finger at his being unable to recover from the trauma he experienced when his wife died in the manner she did.

* HeKnowsTooMuch: The reason why the Langs want to kill Michael.

* HistoryRepeats: Like in St. Louis, the Lang's blow up a federal building and frame an innocent man for it.

* KilledToUpholdTheMasquerade: The professor's new love interest finds out too much. Just before having a convenient fatal car accident, she had left a message on his answering machine regarding her revelation before dying, but this is also erased by the bad guys.

* MakeItLookLikeAnAccident: The professor's new love interest is killed off in a convenient car 'accident' after discovering too much.

* MayDecemberRomance: Hope is in her mid-20s, while Jeff Bridges was 50 at the time (and it's implied that Faraday is the same age).

The movie stars Creator/JeffBridges as a university professor who is an expert on domestic terrorism, and whose wife died in a failed FBI mission some years earlier. He has a young son, a girlfriend (played by Hope Davis) and keeps in touch with his wife's former FBI partner, played by Robert Gossett. One day he begins to suspect his next-door neighbors (played by Creator/TimRobbins and Creator/JoanCusack) to be terrorists, based on a number of incidents that have occurred around them, including their son being hospitalized after an accident involving a firecracker. Nobody will believe him though, finding his ideas crazy and paranoid, pointing the finger at his being unable to recover from the trauma he experienced when his wife died in the manner she did.

* {{Foreshadowing}}: In one of his lectures, Michael discusses a terrorist attack perpetrated by a single individual with no ties to extremist organizations whatsoever, [[spoiler: which is how the terrorist attack at the end is made to look like. Moreover, Michael alone is blamed for it.]]