Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus

Directed by Steven Shainberg

Picturehouse

1.5 Stars



Move over, Martha Stewart—exotic is the new plain, and weird is the new normal. Unfortunately, each is proving that it can be just as boring as its predecessor.

“Taking the center from the margins” seems to be the raison d’être of several of the best films produced in culture-war-America over the past year, from the spectacular “Brokeback Mountain” to the delightful “Little Miss Sunshine.” But director Steven Shainberg and screenwriter Erin Cressinda Wilson—the creative minds behind the charmingly idiosyncratic S&M romantic comedy “Secretary”—have taken the idea to new heights with “Fur,” reaching for margins so extreme as to be unpalatable and a center so trite as to be meaningless.

The film begins in media res, with legendary photographer Diane Arbus (Nicole Kidman) donning a coat of hair that makes her look like some sort of vulture and swooping into a nudist camp. We soon backtrack to see Arbus as an Amish-looking housewife attending to her loving and supportive husband, Allan (Ty Burrell). By the end of the film, we’ve been treated to her transformation by way of midgets, an armless maid, and, most of all, a mysterious wholly-covered-with-hair lover-to-be named Lionel (Robert Downey Jr.), who seems ripped from the pages of “Beauty and the Beast.”

Sound interesting? It could have been, but instead, we’re given Kidman’s attempt to reprise her wonderfully restrained, Oscar-winning turn as Virginia Woolf in “The Hours”—a valiant effort, to be sure, but an unsuccessful one.

And then there is Arbus, whose fascinatingly strange photographs you will sadly not see in this film. Arbus shows us people who are decidedly a part of our world and, though often appearing to be normal, decidedly freakish. Her subjects are often that part of ourselves we refuse to recognize. “Fur” shows us people from another, imaginary world who, despite appearing to be freakish, are decidedly normal and maddeningly bland. It gets the formula backwards, and is all the less powerful for doing so.

Worst of all, however, is the fact that we’ve seen this all before. Shainberg and Wilson merely repeat the formula of their previous film; but whereas “Secretary” felt fresh and unique, “Fur” is stale, shallow, and forgettable—which is a shame, as Shainberg is a director of such obvious talent, a true visual maestro.

“Secretary” cleverly embraced sadomasochism as a personal choice and means to self-affirmation, but “Fur” makes the duo seem obsessed with weirdness—less as a statement of self-identity than as something that is valuable for its own sake. But “weird for weird’s sake” has the side-effect of demonizing the average for the sin of simply being normal while neglecting just how strange, and beautiful, everyday life can often be.

Bottom Line: Don’t let the film’s pretensions fool you: “Fur” is a predictable and empty Hollywood vehicle, and by the time Diane slowly shaves the dying Lionel’s body in the film’s ostensible climax, you’ll find yourself realizing that maybe normal isn’t so bad, after all.

—Reviewer Patrick R. Chesnut can be reached at pchesnut@fas.harvard.edu.