Pitchforks: 3.5/5
Rated: R
Released: April 26, 2012
In "Arthur Newman" a film directed by Dante Ariola, the camera briefly focuses on a poem halfway through the movie that reads, “For fear you’ll be alone / You do many things / You wouldn’t do at all.” Despite its brevity, this poem contains the movie’s central themes: identity and a dichotomy between fear and love.
"Arthur Newman’s" protagonist Arthur Newman (Colin Firth) was once an estranged family man named Wallace Avery. The movie offers only several minutes on Wallace’s life; he almost immediately acquires a passport belonging to a dead man named Arthur Newman. The dealer, as he hands Wallace his new identity, emphasizes that Arthur Newman was “a real human being.”
Apart from this immediate identity change, all the audience knows about Wallace pertains to his tendency to park outside his ex-wife’s house to pull out some binoculars to spy on his former family, which includes his alienated son Kevin (Lucas Hedges).
Wallace heads to a state park outside his home town Orlando, Fla., where he fakes his death along the Atlantic shoreline. Now as Arthur Newman, he travels alone until he meets the medicine-downing kleptomaniac Mikaela “Mike” (Emily Blunt). Whether Arthur retains some nice-guy nature or wants to join the disorderly lifestyle, he tends to the bed-ridden Mike until she recovers from a cough syrup overdose. The two eventually travel together and the audience learns that Mike, too, lives under a fake identity.
With insufficient back stories behind both characters, their identities can never be fully distinguished from their former selves. For instance, a scene halfway through the movie shows Arthur and Mike spying on an elderly couple through binoculars in a car. Arthur continues the same voyeurism he embraced as Wallace. However, this one isolated incident stands out because binoculars were shown in the Wallace segment; all other behavior requires mere guesswork as to its origin in identity.
To make matters more complicated, Arthur and Mike develop a love affair but with a catch; they do not fall in love as Arthur and Mike but as role-playing couples in various homes. The movie juggles with permanent and temporary identities so frequently that any insight the movie provides on identity quickly becomes frustrating in its obscure questions and multidimensional answers that do not properly address the answers the film brings up.
We gather that Arthur’s identity change came from humiliation as a golfer who missed a simple put shot and from his love toward his family. At one point, Arthur says, “Family just crushes your heart, doesn’t it?”
The film includes subtle elements that enhance the trouble in understanding identity. Most scenes when Arthur or Mike face identity crises take place near a reflective water surface. One particular scene at a swimming pool shows two ducks in the water – one white, one black. As Arthur and Mike discuss identity the white duck passes under a shadow until it, too, looks black.
Overall, "Arthur Newman" will reward the patient viewers content with leaving the theater with more questions than answers. The film explores identity, but it does not draw any conclusions. Going back to the poem, the relationships in the movie do more to form identity than the conscious effort to do so; perhaps the muddled messages suggest identity as a core that cannot be changed.
The characters are likable, and the character development arcs efficiently. But the frustratingly conflicting messages that make these characters unknowable eventually wears the movie thin.
Reach the reporter at jconigli@asu.edu
