Fur - An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus

Fur - An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus
by Steven Shainberg

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DVD Cover Information

Actor: Harris Yulin, Jane Alexander, Nicole Kidman, Robert Downey Jr., Ty Burrell
Director: Steven Shainberg
Brand: Warner Brothers
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Original Language)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD-Video, NTSC, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.85:1
Running Time: 122 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2007-05-08
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: New Line Home Video

Movie Reviews of Fur - An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus

Movie Review: A Unique Experience of a Film
Summary: 4 Stars

A very poignantly told tale of this fascinating woman called Diane Arbus. The movie starts off with Dian Arbus 'trapped' in her very ordinary middle-class life with her husband and two kids. Her inner artist is just dying to break free and is finally able to do that by the meeting of a strange neighbour, Lionel. By her friendship with Lionel, Diane is introduced to an entirely different world and she is able to discover her true self and become the artist she was meant to be - or so as the story is told in the film.

What fascinated me was how this whole story is told in the movie. The intricate details of the camera work made the characters' every move, every look, every thought so purposeful and so intense. A very rare form of story-telling in the movie. There were many symbolic moments which, again, were so beautifully put on screen.

Nicole Kidman proves herself, yet again, in this movie. She is the masterpiece that she creates in her craft. I really think she is in her own league in her acting. She has allowed the audience to feel everything that Diane was feeling through her. Robert Downey Jr is another magnificent actor. He has a unique quality to him that no other actor has and this movie just proves him to be one of the greats. He spends most of this movie covered in 'fur' but his erotic charm exudes out of his eyes - what a performance!

I knocked one of the stars off because this movie definitely is not a conventional film that I would recommend to any movie-goer. I recommend it to people who are looking for an unconventional movie experience.

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Summary of Fur - An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus

From the window of her immaculate New York apartment, 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. Mysteriously drawn to the man that intrigues her and determined to take his photograph, Diane ventures to his apartment and embarks on a journey that will unlock her deepest secrets, awaken her remarkable artistic genius, and launches Diane on her 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. Flashing back three months, the viewer comes to learn that she has just left her husband and children to photographically investigate her fetishes through observing the extraordinary. 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. Confusing love with her desire to make art, Arbus is overwhelmed when Lionel perishes, though its made clear to the viewer that this event provides Arbus necessary artistic impetus. Early scenes establishing 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 are strange and funny, successfully separating Arbus from the 'average' people surrounding her. But 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. The tortured artist myth has, once again, been pushed too far. For a film that has such fine costuming, production design, and cinematography, it's a shame that Fur succumbs to that 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 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.--Trinie Dalton

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