Hm. There are a handful of interesting ideas fighting to emerge, but Arthur Newman overall is an experience as dour as it unrewarding. The film stars Colin Firth as a bored Florida man who failed both as a pro golfer and as a father and now finds himself imprisoned by a dead-end job and a tedious day-to-day experience, so he stages his own potential death, assumes the forged identity of retired golfer "Arthur Newman," and splits town, leaving behind, among others, a son from whom he is estranged. Along the way, he comes into contact with Michaela (Emily Blunt), a suicidal and unstable thief on the run from her own troubled past. She becomes his improbable traveling companion on the road to either ruin or redemption.

There is almost zero quantifiable joy to be found in Arthur Newman. Its vision of roadside America is a nightmare to the point of hilarity, a never-ending series of sad motels with sad pools, sad bus stations populated by sad people, etc. with a brief stop in an anonymous suburbia with an air of empty, jaded wealth. And the characters engage in a feature-length competition to determine who is more devoid of hope and self-worth. Still, though, this could be fine, even great, if the character arcs were moving and riveting, but, despite a pair of very gifted leads, the feisty Blunt in particular, they largely remain ciphers in whom it is hard to invest. This may be the point of his character (he is a bore of a man so bored with existence even his imaginary construction of a perfect man is a bore), but his journey sure is a bland drag to endure, and it builds to an inorganic, truncated, and unearned sentimental ending. There are, I admit, a few charges of electricity, including unusual, but intriguing scenes which find the out-of-control duo pursuing couples they spot and entering their homes to live as them (in their clothes, in their beds) for a few hours before moving on, but they never power the overall enterprise, which, at the end of the day, is a well-intentioned, but inauthentic and uninteresting portrait of the human condition in crisis in America.

C-