At the Movies: Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus

I can’t think of a worse title for a movie than Fur, and I can’t think of a less appealing scene in any film ever made than the one in Fur where Diane Arbus, played by Nicole Kidman, shaves several pounds of hair from Robert Downey, Jr.’s body.

I thought I’d get that out of the way at the outset in case you wanted to stop reading this review right now. It’s possible that there is a movie to be found in the life of Diane (pronounced “Dee-anne”) Arbus, America’s foremost photographer of freaks, oddballs, and misfits, but the director Steven Shainberg and the screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson haven’t done it. The filmmakers purchased the rights to Patricia Bosworth’s superb Diane Arbus: A Biography but seem to have drawn only from one narrow part of it, claiming in the film’s publicity release that their work “invents characters and situations that reach beyond reality to express what might have been Arbus’s inner experience on her extraordinary path.” Yes, what might have been, but just as reasonably one feels what might not have been. A dazed and confused viewer could spend most of Fur wondering which fantasies are supposed to be those of Diane Arbus and which ones exist only in the minds of the filmmakers.

Arbus, played by Nicole Kidman, is in her mid-thirties at the start of the film in 1958, a successful fashion stylist married to a photographer (Ty Burrell). One day she sees a bundled up man (Robert Downey, Jr.) sneaking furtively into their apartment building and becomes drawn into his world. (He suffers from a rare disease for which I did not feel compelled to seek out the scientific name.) Downey at first looks like Claude Rains in The Invisible Man; unwrapped, he looks like Jean Marais in Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and The Beast. The film would have us believe that the hairy fellow was Arbus’s introduction to the New York demimonde of characters she would immortalize in her famous photographs, but as Bosworth’s biography makes clear, before 1958 Arbus was already active in New York intellectual and artistic circles, particularly in Greenwich Village, and was quite familiar with many of her future subjects. well before she began her solo career. Yet having found their Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole scenario, Shainberg and Wilson build their entire movie around it, and it seems far too narrow to account for the richness and depth of Arbus’s work. Arbus was the daughter of a wealthy furrier, and the filmmakers apparently couldn’t resist the easy metaphor of hair removal—the “fur” of the title—as a path to revealing a person’s soul. The metaphor is banal and limiting, to say nothing of a bit repulsive.

Downey gives us a sly, perceptive performance from beneath all that fuzz, modulating his voice or tilting an eye to reveal flecks of a character, giving away more of his character literally as the hair comes off. Kidman, once again lending her normally high-priced talents to an independent film, seems repressed by the pretentiousness of the film’s conceit. One wants to give her points for wearing a prosthetic nose in The Hoursand a dog collar in Lars von Trier’s horrifyingly unwatchable, neo-Brechtian Dogville, but it’s hard to credit her with anything more than good intentions. The unfortunate truth is that many of Kidman’s small films are no worthier than some of her commercial ones, such as Bewitched, in which, at least, she got to smile and act silly. The Diane Arbus of Fur might be better played by an actress with more of a flair for the kinky, such as Hilary Swank or maybe Kate Winslet, but who would want to wish it on them? Kidman doesn’t draw you in to Arbus or her world—though perhaps, in retrospect, that’s a bonus.

The freaks in Fur are sentimentalized. They’re just humans like us underneath the weirdness, the film seems to be saying. That’s exactly the opposite, though, of what Arbus’s photographs convey. They are different from us, which is why we can’t turn away from them. The filmmakers want to impart an upbeat feeling about an emphatically downbeat subject; the freaks and their world, it tells us, were Arbus’s pathway to an artistic vision. What it doesn’t say is it that it was also the pathway for a woman who committed suicide only a few years after the events of the film take place. Fur is Diane Arbus through a lens brightly. The brightness is a betrayal of the artist’s unsparing vision.