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Starring Nicole Kidman, Robert Downey Jr, Ty Burrell, Harris Yulin, Jane Alexander. Rated R.
For those unfamiliar with her work, Diane Arbus was a New York photographer who rose to fame with her unique portraits of
unusual subjects – “freaks” was the term she used, with utter reverence – including dwarfs and giants,
transsexuals and nudists. Sound tame? It wasn’t in the ’50s and ’60s, when Arbus took her freaks and put
them center-stage, daring an audience weaned on all-American normalcy to look them in the eyes. Before taking her own life
in 1971, she was a two-time Guggenheim fellow and served as a professor at the Parsons School of Design.
Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus is not terribly concerned with those details. It is not about the life and
death of the artist so much as it attempts to capture what it supposes to have been her essence, as well as her taste for
the exotic and the little known. On that count it succeeds. As Arbus, Nicole Kidman delivers a subtle, understated performance
that captures her character’s transformation from repressed, sexually unfulfilled housewife to daring, liberated woman.
Early on, she joylessly performs her duties as assistant to her fashion-photographer husband, Allan (Ty Burrell). By the end,
she is a confident solo act, more or less, on her path to becoming, according to the film, one of the 20th century’s
great artists.
Director Steven Shainberg is content to show us the journey, but only alludes to the destination. Here, he and screenwriter
Erin Cressida Wilson, the creative forces behind 2002’s Secretary, present their subject’s sexual and spiritual
awakening as the empowering device that spurs her creative growth, using Lionel (Robert Downey Jr.) as the catalyst. Lionel
is the mysterious guy next door who wears a mask – with good reason, since he suffers from hypertrichosis, which causes
excessive hair growth. Think Chewbacca, or the Beast to Kidman’s Beauty.
Diane is instinctively drawn to Lionel, perhaps because he falls so far outside the circle of her family’s high-society
friends, and because his very existence defies any concept of normal. He is a freak, yes, but he’s not lacking for self-confidence.
At his urging, Diane immerses herself in his bizarre world, meeting the kinds of fringe characters who would later appear
in her most famous photographs. In the process, she finds her independence, in more ways than one.
In Fur, Shainberg and Wilson have once again crafted an intriguing tale about a woman’s sexual liberation at
the hands of a dominant male, and indeed, there are obvious similarities (none of them physical) between Lionel and James
Spader’s sadist lawyer in Secretary. Yet that film was driven by a subversive sense of danger, something sorely
lacking here. There’s plenty of tension in Fur, stemming mostly from the awkward love triangle between Diane,
Lionel and the beleaguered Allan, but not enough weirdness.
Perhaps because of her eagerness to embrace the strange and exotic, the real-life Arbus became just as famous for rendering
even mundane images in such a way as to seem freakish. Shainberg’s film makes the freakish – and Arbus herself
– seem unusually tame. That doesn’t take much away from the power of his “imaginary” narrative, which
is at times sluggishly paced, but convincing in its attempt to explain the genesis of Arbus’ unique style. Still, it
seems odd for Shainberg, even in a biopic so quirky and deliberately incomplete, to pay only partial service to the spirit
of his muse’s art.
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