Movie: Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus
Format: DVD
 |
| The heck did I watch... |
This is a weird film to try and talk about. I enjoyed it, but the longer I thought about it, the more parts of it began to bother me. I'll get into that in a moment, but for now, let's run down some facts.
- This movie was made in 2006 and stars Nicole Kidman as Diane Arbus, Ty Burrell as her husband, and Robert Downey Jr as Lionel Sweeney.
- You absolutely should watch this movie before you read the rest of this blog if you're going to watch it at all. I'm going to have some pretty forceful opinions, and I don't want to influence your watching experience!
- This movie is absolutely not a real biopic in the sense that it isn't about real events. This is where my issues begin.
- This movie was not particularly well-received and is deeply polarizing for... well... a multitude of reasons.
- Some of these reasons are that it has full-frontal (and back) nudity from men & women at the same time without sex involved, and that there are people who even today are marginalized (little people, giants, transvestites, people with birth marks or genetic disorders, amputees, etc).
- Diane Arbus was a famous photographer best known for taking pictures of people who were not deemed proper or acceptable as subjects for portraiture. She was very popular for a while in the 60s, but then the 70s hit and suddenly she wasn't wild enough for the public. Sadly, she took her own life before her work resurfaced in popularity again. Very, very little is known about her life.
- Robert Downey Jr's character never existed. The whole plot is a total fabrication, but they're up front about that.
It's hard to talk about this movie, to be honest with you. When we sat down to watch it and it opened (after a long credit sequence where we pan through a bunch of curly auburn cg hair...) on Nicole Kidman in a fur coat wandering into a nudist colony and having a brief sit-down with the leaders. This is a very well-shot scene, depicting the completely and unashamedly nude people the same way you'd depict people going about their daily lives. They do not hide anything in this scene. Everyone is very unclothed and you can see everything. I think though my favorite part is that, since we had the subtitles on, the subtitles themselves tended to act as makeshift censor bars. Especially when one fellow sat down and his dialogue instantly appeared over his... monologue.
This is a beautifully shot movie. The only times we get gray or blue lighting are times when things are unhappy or bad. When we're supposed to feel comfortable (such as with unusual people or when Diane is with Lionel, who I'll get to in a moment), the lighting is warm and usually amber-tinted. The score is completely forgettable with a single exception: there's a scene where Diane & Lionel are in a bar where a little person is singing a love song and everyone's having a grand time.
I'm not 100% there with the story, unfortunately. Or Nicole Kidman's performance.
The story is basically this:
Diane Arbus is married to a man who is very, very plain. He's a fantastic husband and a very good father (we're shown repeatedly that Allan Arbus really does want his wife to be happy, he encourages her photography, he even tries to change himself to make her happier!). Diane's parents, on the other hand, are depicted as snooty, self-absorbed furmongers who care more about appearances than the well-being of their daughter and her family, her mother sniping at Diane about her dress and being upset that it's last year's model. Diane is not wealthy, but her parents are.
 |
| There's a long scene about fur-buying. This is not the eponymous fur. |
Allan tells Diane that she should take some time away from the photography business and encourages her constantly, not even getting a little upset after she tells him that she basically flashed the neighborhood after she nearly has a nervous breakdown because of... reasons? We're not really given a "why" as to Diane's apparent anxiety. The noise doesn't build, the lights don't overpower, she just falls apart when asked simple, basic questions. Maybe some extra reasoning there would have helped. I don't know. Regardless, he does his best to roll with her weirdness (which she tells us about in a fairly stilted conversation with him in bed later). I like Allan Arbus here. I don't know if it's an accurate depiction of him, but Ty does a good job.
 |
| Ty Burrell does a fantastic job. He has the most emotional range of everyone in this movie. It's too bad that the movie seems to want us to think he's the bad guy. He's not. He's just a good husband to the wrong wife. They're incompatible. |
Now we get to RDJ's character.
Lionel.
Lionel is the new neighbor. He lives upstairs and clogs the pipes with hair. He's always wearing a mask outside and using an inhaler. He's... kind of a douchebag, actually. I love Robert Downey Jr. One of my favorite movies is Kiss Kiss Bang Bang! Unfortunately, this is maybe not one of his better roles. To be honest with you, the character is the biggest problem I have with this movie.
It's not because of the makeup effects, though. It's one of the best on-camera attempts I've seen to approximate hypertrichosis (that's wolfman-syndrome for us lay-folk). Then again... it's very rare for hypertrichosis to result in... well... this:
 |
| And yes, this movie is a lot like "The Shape of Water" in one particular way... |
You may have guessed that Lionel, here, is the source of some major issues.
Simply put, he's the only reason Diane goes out and does anything. His very character robs her of any self-determination. He robs her of her power. Certainly Diane didn't leave her family to have a fulfilling life as a photographer - she left them because the hot werewolf upstairs with the rabbit and the ferrets (bad, bad, bad idea to leave those animals loose around each other, but thankfully nothing ever comes of that) was super dreamy and accused her of banging her way through the family staff...
There is a definite sweetness to their relationship, all snark aside. He nurtures her strangeness and brings her to all kinds of new people (the dominatrix scene is pretty great, especially the line "look at his socks!") and new situations (a body being prepared for burial features at one point). He expands her horizons and introduces her to cross-dressers, little people, etc, because of course he was in the circus which means he knows every "freak" in New York.
Honestly, the more I think about the movie, the more I realize what an injustice it is to such a wonderful artist.
In the end, after things have ended with Lionel, he leaves her a book to put all her new plates in, encouraging her to build a portfolio of all the things she wanted.
This is galling when you know that she had a real relationship that ended up with her having a portfolio. That relationship was with the very married Marvin Israel (she knew about his wife and that he would not leave her). He gave her the push to start building a portfolio. He was the one who gave her the push to eventually show her work. And all the while, she was still caring for her daughters and visiting her ex-husband, who developed all her film.
Her life was so much more interesting than this movie makes it out to be! And that's the biggest issue I have with Fur - it's not Nicole Kidman's staring or her obnoxiously breathy voice, it's the fact that this story completely obliterates how bizarre she really was as a person, making her into some hanger-on to a retired circus freak and erasing her real-life relationships.
 |
| Her face is like that for about 80% of the movie guys. And yeah, that's the dress her mom complained about. Her mom bought it for her. |
Don't get me wrong - I legitimately enjoy this as a movie. It's just not a good movie about Diane Arbus (it's pronounced Dee-Anne, by the way). It's a great movie about a married woman who falls in love with a werewolf, though.
7/10, would recommend!
Go Enjoy Something!
FC
Half-Assed Photo Bibliography:
Poster
Parents
are awful
Ty
is second bananer
RDJ
Fur
Kidman
Mopes
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments are now moderated, so if your comment doesn't appear right off, it's just bc I haven't seen the email yet sorry!