Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus
Directed by Steven Shainberg
As Neal Cassady in Heart Beat, 1980’s very imaginative, Edward Hopperesque evocation of the Beat era, Nick Nolte declared: “I don’t know what art is. But I know I don’t like it.” Nolte memorably created a commonsense man with a poet’s soul (and his wavy blond hair—a hipster’s halo—was the best since Jean Marais in Orpheus). Nolte’s Cassady would have spit at Fur, the archly artistic movie by Steven Shainberg that bills itself as “An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus.” Fur illustrates how far we’ve gotten from trailblazing Beat-era aesthetics to an indie cinema that preens about its own pretenses. Shainberg is so excessively concerned with making art—and so impressed with how Arbus’ photography of real life subjects gained cultural status—that he forgets a common sense perspective on behavior and art.
Set in the late ’50s, like Heart Beat, Fur spins off from that era’s conformity. But the protagonist dreamed up by Shainberg and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson, doesn’t see past 1950’s moral hypocrisy and social rigidity. Instead, she suffers it, glamorously: Shainberg casts the tall, blue-eyed, Barbie doll-featured Nicole Kidman to represent the short, dark-haired, dark-eyed Arbus. This immediately transforms historical fact into a politically loaded fantasy. Kidman’s pale, Waspy image justifies the class aspirations of Arbus’ Russian-Jewish fur merchant parents who named their daughter Diane (using the wishfully patrician pronunciation “Dee-An”).
Kidman’s movie star iconography is far different from Nolte’s working-class romanticism in Heart Beat; she’s aloof, not earthy or erotic. Kidman’s Diane is so remote from normal social pressures that when she awakens from her princessy spell in a Manhattan townhouse and takes up her fashion-photographer husband’s Rolleiflex to commemorate various eccentrics and unfortunates, it’s as if she stepped from a TV-commercial cliché to an other-side-of-the-tracks cliché. She seems to have learned only a very privileged and select style of compassion. Shainberg proposes that the freakish images that give many viewers pause about Arbus’ photography mirrored Arbus’ view of her own freakiness. That’s not romanticism; it’s sentimentality.
Fur repeats the same misunderstanding of abnormality as Shainberg’s 2002 Mary Gaitskill adaptation, Secretary, by attempting to be both outré and moralistic. Unwilling to admit the destructiveness in Gaitskill’s heroine, Shainberg normalized her neuroses. His use of sadomasochism as a source of comic/sexual release might have been scandalous if it was not so fashionably cozy. Here, Shainberg’s sappiness goes so far as to imagine Diane’s affair with a mysterious upstairs neighbor. Get ready for this: a former circus sideshow performer named Lionel Sweeney (Robert Downey Jr.) who has a mutant disorder—“hypertricosis”—which causes him to grow hair over 90 percent of his body. He looks like Claude Rains in The Wolf Man. Shainberg’s interpretation of Arbus’ sensibility (“her inner experience on her extraordinary path”) comes down to Beauty and the Beast banality—rather simpleminded when dealing with an artist who specialized in confrontation, shock and perhaps a hint of social criticism. But that’s the hard, real-world, Neal Cassady stuff that Shainberg (in his ivory-condo) avoids.
By the time Diane climbs a ladder, unloosens the bolts on a trap door hidden in her ceiling and jerry-rigs a staircase for Sweeney and his motley assortment of carnival friends to, then, step down into her apartment like the parade at the end of Fellini’s 8 1/2 (rather than simply use the front door), it becomes clear that Fur is only nominally interested in Diane Arbus’ biography. Fur is a movie for the kind of people who liked Capote. It is made with that same, truly freakish fascination with unknowable dead celebrities to whom they can condescend. But at least Shainberg is honest about his “imaginary” poetic license. Tension between Diane, her husband (Ty Burrell), her grandstanding parents (Harris Yulin, Jane Alexander) and her mysteriously vengeful daughters is never resolved, nor quite credible, because Shainberg is as exploitative as he is sensitive.
Sadly, numbingly, Shainberg is not as imaginative as he thinks. He doesn’t connect to the art of the era as John Byrum, director of Heart Beat did. Fur’s fairytale references are fatuous. Diane explores Lionel’s lair like Alice through the looking glass; her huge face poking through tiny portals. Lionel makes tea that drugs her, and she drifts into artsy 8mm-style home-movie hallucinations about her childhood. (Her vision of privilege is a raccoon served on a silver platter next to a skeleton key on a red pillow.) Then, the movie slowly drags in David Lynch surrealism: hyped-up sound effects, Carter Burwell’s impressionistic city sounds score; when Diane and Lionel visit his favorite subterranean haunts, he wears a burlap mask that recalls Lynch’s The Elephant Man. All this is “Art” with arrows pointing to it. Yet nothing in Fur matches the unforgettable moment in The Elephant Man when Anthony Hopkins’ character first beholds John Merritt’s misfortune and feels a human connection—his own humanity pours out.
Michel Gondry’s Human Nature, featuring a hairy Patricia Arquette, was a funny, more empathetic and vastly superior satire of nature and nurture. But Shainberg’s specialties are psychological cripples who suffer politically fashionable malaise. Who else to play this abstraction except Nicole Kidman, who is as expressive as an automaton model and whose career is distinguished by little talent, poor taste and huge ambition? Between her abstracted Virgina Woolf of The Hours, that hoyden horror of Moulin Rouge and the numbskull madonna of Birth, I’m not sure what Kidman’s specialty is, but there’s no liking it.
