Hairy Tale

Fur spins an imaginary account of Diane Arbus' awakening.

by Cindy Fuchs

Diane Arbus (Nicole Kidman) is looking for something. According to Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, she seeks connection and understanding, relationships with her photographic subjects. She doesn't know this as she begins her work, but she appears restless, haunted, even a little afraid. In part this look is a function of Kidman's embodiment: She's pale and devastatingly slender, her figure prim, almost encased in the perfect '50s dresses, pink or blue, that she wears in the film's early scenes. But the look is also conditioned by the film's effort to make her comprehensible. Her shifting self-image is registered in typical terms (changed hair, changed demeanor), but her photos help her keep her self-preserving distance.

The detail that best describes this distance is Diane's camera, a Rolleiflex. A boxy device held low, it demands that you look down into the lens at the top of the camera, rather than through a lens straight ahead, and so allowed Arbus a particular engagement with her subjects (it also determined the squarish shape of her images). The picture-taking process is thus dynamic, such that the artist looks up (at the subject) and down (at the lens) to set up a shot. The perspective is never static, and as such, sustains a particular kind of distance between subject and artist.

ALICE IN UNDERLAND: Nicole Kidman's Diane Arbus starts looking up.

Very loosely adapted by Erin Cressida Wilson from Patricia Bosworth's biography, Fur shows this camera repeatedly; Diane clutches it, sets it down, carries it with her as a kind of ticket into her new life. Her old life, as the wife of fashion photographer Allan Arbus (Ty Burrell) is complicated, if restrictive. She works as his assistant, attending to models' makeup and outfits, but also handling, loading and prepping the cameras between shots. She knows the business of posing and arranging, shooting and developing, so that her decision to make her own portraits, to work with other sorts of models, those deemed "imperfect" rather than "perfect," is also a decision to make a different sort of art, to express herself rather than sell product.

This is not to say that Arbus' work didn't become a kind of "product," with a peculiar stamp and value. But Fur presents her decision through a personal journey, imagining that she leaves her husband and career with him because she finds herself in another way (not unlike Wilson's previous collaboration with director Steven Shainberg, Secretary). That is, she finds herself in another man, and an excessively metaphorical man at that.

A fictional catalyst for Diane's transformation, Lionel (Robert Downey Jr.) moves in upstairs and immediately begins to seduce her. He goes so far as to drop a key to his apartment into her plumbing (this provides the film's most humorous moment, as Diane digs in to fix the pipes, reaching into goo and banging away as her daughter looks on). Lionel becomes the center of Diane's transition from assistant to artist, encouraging and challenging her to leave behind the familiar. On one level, he's a rather literal metaphor, covered head to foot in fur representing her desires, her repressed sexuality, her passions. (The link from this idea to the fact that her father, played by Harris Yulin, was a successful New York City furrier is not subtle.) On another, almost-the-same level, Lionel is also emblematic of all the unusual subjects Arbus photographed, from the transvestites to the Jewish giant to the big-eyed twins. He invites her to take his portrait, and as she spends the entire movie preparing to do so, their relationship comes to signify all the relationships she developed with her subjects: She took many photos of each in order to come up with the one photo that would be published or displayed.

For the viewer who doesn't know so much about Arbus, this biographical point (the multiple photos, the time spent with subjects) will be lost. What you see here is the specific instance of Lionel, who appears by turns demanding, taunting, seductive and vulnerable. Intrigued when Lionel invites her to meet his friends — a cellist without arms, a prostitute, a giant and other folks who work as circus "freaks" — Diane stops attending to her usual routines (say, cooking and cleaning), and starts listening to jazz, leaving her hair uncombed and pulling her Rollei out from under her bed to carry it with her up the stairs to Lionel's apartment.

Diane's change affects her family, alarming her two children and disappointing her imperious mother (Jane Alexander), who advises her to stay home and "be a little portrait photographer." But her romance with Lionel, even as it takes her outside her home and neighborhood, is also limiting, in that he is, for all his furriness, a very regular heterosexual object. It makes her biography legible, if "imaginary," but it also makes her desire and work — so thrillingly strange — a little too familiar.

(c_fuchs@citypaper.net)

Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus

Directed by Steven ShainbergA Picturehouse releaseOpens Friday at Ritz Bourse