Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus

Starring: Nicole Kidman, Robert Downey Jr., Ty Burrell, Jane Alexander, Emmy Clarke, Boris McGiver, Emily Bergl

Written by: Erin Cressida Wilson

Directed by: Steven Shainberg

Distributor: Picturehouse

Rated: R

Legendary photographer Diane Arbus pushed an unflinching lens into the type of subject matter popular American culture had avoided in the early 1960s. She studied with Brodovich and Avedon. She took images that cast light into the beauty of the visually freakish. She was a visionary who had completely burnt herself out by 1971, when she took her own life. In Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Dian Arbus, Director Steven Shainberg and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson (the team most recently responsible for 2002’s Secretary) bring to the screen a mildly interesting film inspired by Arbus’ life and work.

Mega-star actress Nicole Kidman plays Arbus, who at film’s beginning has yet to pick up a camera and begin the journey that will come to define her life. Ty Burell plays her husband, a competent professional photographer who runs his own studio with Diane’s help. The movie chronicles Arbus’ fascination with images as she becomes acquainted with a man living upstairs from her named Lionel (Robert Downey Jr.). Lionel has hypertrichosis, a rare disorder that causes excessive amounts of hair to grow all over the body. Lionel proves to be quite charming and ushers Arbus into the strange world of the social outcast. Arbus soon gets lost in this strange new world, almost completely forsaking her life as a wife and mother of two.

Since this is an imaginary portrait if Diane Arbus, it is not historically accurate. None of the events of the film actually happened. Wilson and Shainberg seem to have abandoned historical biography for allegorical narrative. Kidman is playing a character that is based on a superficial conception of Arbus gleaned from some of the things that she photographed. This isn’t a story about Arbus so much as it is a story about Wilson and Shainberg’s conception of those things she pointed a camera at so often. Since the story is only tangentially related to the life of the woman it is meant to be a portrait of, it can best be analyzed as a lush, sensual drama about above affair between a housewife and an excessively hirsute man of pleasant demeanor.

Completely ignoring who the film is supposed to be about, it actually holds-up remarkably well. Kidman is considerably enjoyable as prim, June Cleaver-esque 1960’s housewife fascinated by the world outside her immediate surroundings. She’s something of an Alice in Lionel’s strange wonderland. Downey Jr. is suitably charming as a man whose genetics have thrust him outside of the mainstream. There is a richly realized visual reality to the film that unravels as we become more and more acquainted with Lionel. Kidman looks around at it all with a pleasingly wide-eyed fascination. Shainberg isn’t quite as good a Putting On the Weird as more accomplished directors like Tim Burton or Terry Gilliam, but it isn’t for lack of trying.

As vaguely interesting as it all is sensually, Fur fails to keep the attention for very long. Rather than keeping their cinematic dream pleasantly short, Shainberg and Wilson string the film out for a painful two hours. The drama doesn’t hold out. Kidman and Downey Jr. are good together, but the plot doesn’t do enough with their chemistry to keep it interesting. By the time that Lionel asks Arbus to shave his body near the film’s end, the film has spent all its energy. The plot and pacing make the romance between the two of them seems weak when it should be fresh and powerful. VS