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Fur - An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus [2006]
![Fur - An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus [2006]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51z1Fjvs4uL._SL160_.jpg)
Early scenes establishing Arbus's distaste for society parties, such as the fur fashion show her parents host, her boredom during her husband's dull, ridiculous commercial photo shoots, and her initial fascination with Lionel and his bizarre friends are strange and funny, successfully separating Arbus from the 'average' people surrounding her. But as Lionel and Arbus fall in love, pretentious whispering replaces their regular conversations, and overacting spoils Lionel's death scene, in which they both float dramatically through the ocean, followed by Arbus crying in the surf like a weenie. Arbus desperately huffing air from a life raft Lionel inflated before he died is completely cheesy. The tortured artist myth has, once again, been pushed too far. For a film that has such fine costuming, production design, and cinematography, it's a shame that Fur succumbs to that Hollywood convention of reducing the entire plot to a tragic love story. For a project with so much potential, and with so many Arbus fans eagerly awaiting this tribute to the great photographer, it's unfortunate that Fur falls flat, due mostly to injected sentimental melodrama in scenes where it has no place. If Arbus sought to expel saccharine emotionality from portrait photography, then it's odd that a biopic dedicated to her memory would be so unabashedly corny. --Trinie Dalton
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Editorial
Amazon.co.uk Review
Modeled loosely on Patricia Bosworth's 1984 biography, Fur opens with an independent, working Diane Arbus (Nicole Kidman), free of the familial restraints that previously prevented her from making art. Flashing back three months, the viewer comes to learn that she has just left her husband and children to photographically investigate her fetishes through observing the extraordinary. When Lionel (Robert Downey Jr.), a wig-maker who suffers from hypertrichosis, or excessive hair growth, moves into Arbus's apartment building with his entourage and basement full of carnival props, Arbus is seduced by this opportunity to visually feast on freaks. The split with her conventional family becomes inevitable. Confusing love with her desire to make art, Arbus is overwhelmed when Lionel perishes, though its made clear to the viewer that this event provides Arbus necessary artistic impetus.
Editorial
Synopsis
Was Diane Arbus a brilliant innovator whose photographs captured the beauty in the most desperate of subjects? Or was she an exploiter of ‘freaks,’ shilling pictures of the deformed as a modern-day sideshow? Regardless of where one stands on her work, few can argue its impact on the art world. In FUR: AN IMAGINARY PORTRAIT OF DIANE ARBUS, director Steven Shainberg makes a bold first attempt at bringing the artist to the big screen. The film opens with Arbus (Nicole Kidman) living as a depressed housewife in a ritzy Park Avenue apartment. Assisting her husband Allen (Ty Burrell) in his photography studio, Arbus helps him shoot ads for women's magazines. One night, after spying her mysterious next door neighbour--a sharply dressed man with a hood over his face--Arbus decides to heed her husband's advice to step out and take some photos of her own. She climbs the stairs to her neighbor's apartment with the intention of taking his portrait, and there she meets Lionel (Robert Downey, Jr.). Lionel suffers from hypertrichosis, a disease that causes thick hair to grow over every inch of his body, including his face. He and Arbus strike up a flirtatious friendship, and he introduces her to the underworld of New York. They party with dwarves, dominatrixes, and circus performers--all future subjects of Arbus photographs. Arbus's marriage soon begins to fall apart, and her relationship with Lionel builds towards a traumatic, but transformative, end.
In an unusual twist, screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson has completely fabricated the character of Lionel, and his ensuing effect on Arbus. He is Wilson's fantastical idea of what might have spurred Arbus's metamorphosis from repressed housewife to daring documentarian of those living on the fringe. As the title states, this isn't a biopic--it's an "imaginary portrait," and while some might take exception to FUR's surreal spin on reality, others might find the unconventional film a fitting tribute to the always unconventional artist.
A Gentle Love Story
Review date: 2008-07-23 Rating: 8 out of 10
If one forgets that the lead is meant to be a real person and approach this film for what it is, essentially a love story, then one won't be disappointed. I didn't know who Diane Arbus was before seeing the film and it made not a jot of difference. The storyline is not totally unrealistic - a bored housewife stumbling across a new and different world through the medium of a new neighbour and the effects it has on her family. The performances are strong, particularly Robert Downey Jr, who even covered in hair, remains as charismatic as ever.
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Reviews
Why is this film labeled as a Diane Arbus film?
Review date: 2008-05-27 Rating: 4 out of 10
I was so looking forward to this film, but disappointed that it was never on general release at the cinema. I flukely found it whilst looking for second golf clubs in a charity shop. My luck day or so I thought. Now I have read the biography on Diane Arbus by Patricia Bosworth. That book was very depressing but it opened my eyes to her photographic talent.
I so wanted this film to be a true reflection of her unique talent and was very disappointed. The director has obviously tried to make a Arthouse type of film but this tale is more "Alice in Wonderland" then anything remotely arty.
The film is advertised as an imaginary story of Diane Arbus and I am so confused as to why her name is even mentioned. The storyline is fictitious and though Diane Arbus did photograph the unusual and had an ie for "freaks of nature" I cannot recall any mention of her photographing a person who more closely looked like a wild animal or werewolve then a person. I can't recall even seeing a photograph of one in her portfolios. No this director has clearly used Diane Arbus's name to see his attempt to produce an Arty film.
I can see why the film was never on general release and whilst the film is enjoyable, to me its cheated me out of watching a film about this talented, unique and depressed photographer who died prematurely.
Beautiful Cinematography
Review date: 2008-04-08 Rating: 10 out of 10
You can see a movie.
Or a work of art.
This movie is a work of art.
Thank you for the wondefull experience
Nicole,Robert,Ty,Steven,Erin,Patricia,Carter for the wondefull music
and finally Bill!
Intriguing and beguiling....
Review date: 2008-03-16 Rating: 8 out of 10
What a quirky little film. I don't want to give too much away, because when I chose this film, I had no idea what it was really about, and as the film unfolded, I found myself being so completely drawn in. I'm glad I didn't read anything about it now, and I only knew that Nicole Kidman was in it, but the moment you hear his voice, you'll know who her neighbour is. This is a very intriguing film, beautifully played out by all involved. As it's not strictly a biographical film, I still am none the wiser who Diane Arbus is, or what her work was like, but if she inspired a film like this, she must have been very influential.
Every picture tells a story.
Review date: 2008-02-20 Rating: 8 out of 10
Any instance in which a filmmaker attempts to blend ideas of fact with fiction - especially when that particular fact is fairly well known and tied to an iconic historical figure - they're going to have problems in maintaining a connection with certain factions of their audience. Just look at some previous examples of this same stylistic device in other films; such as Dreamchild (1985) for instance, in which an elderly Alice Liddell reflects on her time spent with Lewis Carroll and his obsessive compulsion to nail her character to the very pages of his most celebrated work. Even more polarising was David Cronenberg's adaptation of the cult novel Naked Lunch (1991), in which elements of the author's life and works were blended together to create a torturous, darkly-comic and highly homo-erotic trek through the damaged psychological territory of a Burroughs-like bug exterminator. A similar approach was also used by director Steven Sodebergh and screenwriter Lem Dobbs with their coolly expressionistic merging of the fantastical and horrific writings of Franz Kafka (1991), with the more mundane, everyday-like tedium of his real life and work.
Fur (2006), which makes its intentions clear with the subtitle "an imaginary portrait of Diane Arbus", takes on a similar approach to the films aforementioned; blending elements of personal fact and actual biographical detail with a story that is pure, fairy tale fabrication. Having watched the film just a few days ago, I browsed the Internet for previous reviews to get a sense of how other audiences had approached it. In doing so, I was quite shocked and surprised to see just how violently some viewers had reacted to the film; citing everything from the liberal approach of the film's script, the central performance from Nicole Kidman, and the fundamental message that seems implied by the film's very tender sense of emotional drama as reasons why this film was worthless or simply not good. This surprised me for two reasons, firstly; that these intelligent and well-versed viewers were unable to separate the elements of fact surrounding the real life Diane Arbus and her extraordinary body of work from the quite clearly fabricated depiction of grotesque beauty that the filmmakers create through the imagined relationship between our caricature of Diane and a character named Lionel; a mysterious former carnival performer. Secondly, it surprised me that these viewers felt that Arbus's life would be better served by a routine, by the books Hollywood biopic in which all the facts and back stories are simplified, and we end up with a very simple film about the triumph of the little guy against all odds.
Do people really want bland, cookie-cutter, connect the dots cinema; a struggle over adversary and all the usual nonsense that comes with those A-Z, biographical features, such as Walk the Line (2005) and Ray (2004)? Sadly, it would appear so. What happened to audiences craving imaginative, free-thinking cinema? Something that attempts to deconstruct a greater truth in an intelligent, imaginative and emotionally captivating way that is genuinely suited to the visual, metaphorical capabilities that cinema presents. For me, everything you would need to know about Arbus is here and everything you would need to know about her art is divulged in a number of interesting, highly imaginative visual quirks. You just have to scratch beneath the surface. Read between the lines and you'll see with this film the very psychological impulse and motivation to create something beautiful from the seemingly mundane; to capture that all too fleeting moment and preserve it on film forever. Fur, for me, took us inside the psychological world of Arbus, with none of the black and white moralising or textbook type tedium that often plagues this particular genre; but instead, showing us some of the potential ideas and imagined situations that came to instil her work with such a grotesque sense of beauty.
It has a long been said; "every picture tells a story". That's what this film is about. Anyone can read a book about the real life Arbus; but how on earth is that enriching the cinematic medium? I personally don't look to cinema to find something that is readily available to me at my local library. This film takes us inside Arbus' world and gives us a beautifully told and imaginative back-story that blends elements of real-life fact with references to gothic literature, fairy stories, history and the subjective power of the art itself. The creative spirit of this film is exactly in tune with Arbus's creative vision. To give us something like the Rocky (1976) of photographer-themed biographical pictures would, to my mind at least, have been a much greater insult to the unique and continually captivating universe that this particular artist created through her work. You may disagree with the approach, or fail to see the appeal of the story, but for me, Fur is the kind of film that I feel I could go back to again and still find a number of things worth raving about; including ideas and themes that I may have missed before.
Like one of Arbus's iconic pictures, Fur presents us with something seemingly drab, seemingly bizarre, and allows us to take the time to see the inherent beauty behind it. Like the work of Diane Arbus itself, you can choose to see it as something unfeeling or exploitative, or alternatively, you can see it as a gateway into understanding the enormous amount of empathy that Arbus had for her bizarre and often extraordinary subjects. The direction manages to create a mood and an ambience that is halfway between the aforementioned William S. Burroughs and the antiseptic 50's Americana of The Bell Jar, with the otherworldly danger and mystique of a film like Pan's Labyrinth (2006). Alongside these stylistic elements we also have continual references to Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and the notion of Beauty and the Beast, and all tied together by the fine performances from Kidman as the shackled, stifled Arbus and Robert Downey Jr. as the mysterious and sympathetic Lionel. Truly, an intelligent, imaginative and captivating piece of work.
Product Details/Specifications
Actor(s):
Robert Downey Jr.
Nicole Kidman
Creators:
Nicole Kidman (Primary Contributor)
Robert Downey Jr. (Primary Contributor)
Director(s):
Recording label: Entertainment in Video
Manufacturer: Entertainment in Video
EAN: 5017239194733
Binding: DVD
Number of items: 1
Format: Anamorphic, PAL,
Release date: 2007-07-23
Aspect ratio: 1.78:1
Audience rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
Region code: 2
Running time: 117 minutes
Theatrical release date: 2006
Language: English (Original Language)