Fur - Diane Arbus Portrait [DVD]

From her immaculate New York apartment window, lonely housewife Diane Arbus (Kidman) locks eyes with a masked figure on the street, a mysterious new neighbor (Downey, Jr.) whose penetrating gaze strips the veneer off her tidy reality. Determined to take his photograph and mysteriously drawn to the intriguing man, Diane ventures to his apartment and embarks on a journey that will unlock her deepest secrets, awaken her remarkable artistic genius, and launch her on the path to becoming the artist she is meant to be.

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. The viewer comes to learn that she has just left her husband and children to photographically investigate her fetishes through observing the extraordinary, as the film flashes back three months. 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 as Arbus is overwhelmed when Lionel perishes, though it's made clear to the viewer that this event provides Arbus the necessary artistic impetus.

Early scenes establish 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, successfully separating Arbus from the 'average' people surrounding her. However, 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, and the tortured artist myth has, once again, been pushed too far.

Despite the film's fine costuming, production design, and cinematography, Fur succumbs to the 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 the 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.

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