Arthur Newman (2012)

  This is director Dante Ariola’s dark psychological plumbing of the screwball comedy. You know, like Bringing Up Baby aka What’s Up Doc? Uptight white male hero meets freewheeling femme whacko and it’s love … at the end of the disastrous trail.

Here the laughs are light. This is a sombre examination of identities, how we find them, why we need them, how we’re both bound to them yet compelled to flee them. How we can/can’t recover one.

Wallace Avery starts with a shattered identity. He was a very promising amateur golfer but fell apart on the pro circuit. His golf identity eroded his function first as a husband and more hurtfully as a father. Now he’s a Fed Ex functionary with a one-way committed girlfriend. Cut off from his son, he created a room for him, a shrine the kid has never seen. The connection defines the distance between them.

When he can’t live up to his role as golfer, dad, lover, businessman, what does a guy do? Make himself a Newman (pause halfway thru). Arthur J., to be precise. Wallace fakes his death — by drowning, aptly, for a drama about immersions as self — and drives off to a casually promised job as a Terre Haute private golf course pro.

He’s barely on the road when he encounters Mike — a woman really named Charlotte, but you know how shifty identity can be. Clearly Arthur/Wallace and Mike/Charlotte have something in common and will hotly hit the sack before you can say QED.

Mike is introduced vandalizing her lover’s wife’s car, on some kind of bad trip. Gently concerned, Arthur takes her to the hospital and attends to her there. As they gradually adjust to each other their relationship continues but stiffly, with many jabs and no caresses. Turns out she’s fleeing an identity too. With a psychotic mother and a psychotic twin sister (the true “Mike”) , Charlotte is rootless, unfocused, driven, self-destructive.

        In a supporting theme the unconnected couple witness a diabetic man die at  bus station. Wallace tries to revive him. Mike steals his identification, so he dies as an Unknown. Our central couple take a siginificant step towards humanity when they look up the man's widow and deliver the news. More personally, this extremely odd couple stumble into a mode of relationship that will finally get them into bed. Ok, to intimacy. 

But it’s only through their respective shields. Their sex happens only when they role play. They follow strangers, study them, then enter their homes, assume their unwitting hosts’ clothes and identities and finally make the beast with two backs. Well, as they’re playing others it’s maybe four.They’re themselves only when they’re others so when they’re just themselves they can’t get it together.

Until the end. Even there the uniting is a separation. Both return to their abandoned identities because… well that’s who they are. It’s not like in the movies, where you can just play someone else when you feel like it.