Arthur Newman paints an empty picture of sadness and growth

It’s an odd thing about names and identity — the name is everything that symbolizes who we are at that point in time. Nicknames are introduced and discarded, and often people take new names when they get married. But names aren’t everything; even if you change your name, that doesn’t mean you’ve changed yourself. That’s not the only way to escape who you are; sometimes it seems easier to run away than confront your problems. Sometimes it’s even the right choice. But usually it isn’t.

Arthur Newman is immediately reminiscent of every other indie quasi-romance movie you’ve ever seen, with its muted colors, long stretches of no dialogue, frequent closeups of actors’ faces, and supremely high-minded dialogue. Colin Firth plays a man changing his identity to Arthur Newman to escape problems in past, taking a road trip to find some sort of success after a lifetime of failures. In doing so, he abandons his girlfriend Mina (Anne Heche) and his mostly estranged son Grant (Sterling Beaumon), who lives with his mother and is very bitter. While stopped at a random motel somewhere on the eastern US seaboard, Arthur saves the life of troubled waif Mike (Emily Blunt), who has her own complicated and sad back story. After the classic set of expected back and forths, the two head off on their little adventure. Then the question becomes: Who’s really the damaged one here? Can they help each heal or just make things worse? And what about Mina and Grant, who aren’t sure what happened?

This movie is nothing original, nothing terribly unique. Arthur and Mike fancy themselves deep thinkers but they’re really quite shortsighted and ultimately very confused about everything. There are a few times where the movie samples the “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” trope, but that gets switched up a bit because of the transient nature of both the two main characters. The primary draw of this movie is not the writing nor the simplistic plot, but the effective performances of the two leads. The two Brits playing Americans are really excellent, drawing more subtlety and power from these characters than the movie deserves. Like a lot of these sorts of movies, it gets very slow at times, and sometimes a bit boring. In the end, the movie just seems to be hoping for redemption and catharsis for these characters, and it’s not quite deserved. There’s a fun middle act that smashes to a screeching halt, but that’s almost besides the point.

There may not be anything truly new to see here, but sometimes seeing tremendous acting is all you really want.