Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus (2006)

I enjoyed this film, but it made me wish someone would do a historically accurate film about Diane Arbus to go with this self-admitted fantasy.

I felt a strong relationship with this film and Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits - something I haven't noticed any critics remarking upon, so maybe it's a weaker correlation than I believe. In both cases a shy, repressed woman releases her wild inner self by an encounter with a colorful, bizarre, and maybe imaginary neighbor.

The film's striking visual style is complimented enormously by a standout score from Carter Burwell. Here he gets to take a much more active role than the usual minimalism he employs in the Coen brothers films for which he is famous.

Fmovies: Being lucky enough to have a free pass for the press this morning I attended the press screening of this film at the Roma Film Festival, which opened today. I would like to share some thoughts. First of all, this is far from being a biographical account of the photographer Diane Arbus. The film, with shows not a single of her works, just covers the few key months in which Arbus discovered to be an artist, leaving her well-to-do environment. One day ante litteram desperate housewife Arbus, married with the mild mannered advertising photographer Allan, looking outside the window sees Lionel, their new neighbour: this is the beginning of the most unusual of love stories, around which the whole film revolves. Lionel, which is an entirely fictional character, suffers from ipertrichosis, a pathological condition which makes his body and his face completely covered with hair. Lionel helps Arbus to discover herself and introduce her to the world of the freaks, like himself is, which would be the subject of most of her work. The title of the film states it is an imaginary portrait of the artist. It's more like a wild fantasy loosely inspired to her figure. Kidman's performance is good, but not mind-blowing. Robert Downey Jr.'s is more interesting: with his face completely covered with hair he manage to create a rather intriguing character, acting just with his eyes and his beautiful voice. I must say that after the screening the press audience was pretty harsh with the film. It's not really a BAD movie, one can say that in its way it has also a kind of weird charm. Steven Shainberg's direction is creative and interesting. Still, the film has many very weak points. There are really A LOT of unintentionally funny things, first of all the striking resemblance between Robert Downey Jr.'s character and Star Wars hairy fellow Chewbacca. Two or there meant to be serious lines made the audience (and me) laugh out loud. A few scenes were nearly ridiculous. If you are a fan of Kidman or Downey Jr. you can give a chance to this film: don't expect a serious work about Diane Arbus, but rather a very strange dream, and maybe you'll enjoy it. 6/10

Defying biopic clichés and overlapping reality and fantasy - so that the viewer eventually hardly understands what's real and what's not - "Fur" is definitely a provocative movie, not only another version of "The Beauty and the Beast". The odd subject is handled with impeccable effects and a stunning acting, the obvious question is asked by a HUGE metaphor - what's better between a man covered with fur and snobbish people wearing fur? Truly intriguing the film has some stasis moments that prevent it from being excellent, nevertheless it's about an interesting story, certainly worth viewing. Plus it gives a singular and also metaphorical finale showing Kidman removing her clothing along with her "social vestment".

Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus fmovies. For anyone who cares to know something about the real Diane Arbus, or who values psychological veracity, this film is abysmal. Arbus was a brilliant, talented, restless, and troubled person, but this film depicts her as completely self-involved, and truly bizarre in her taste and judgment. Kidman portrays her as wan and vague, whereas she was someone who knocked people over with her charisma. The totally fictional relationship that is central to the film is quite unbelievable, and Robert Downey is truly annoying in his smirking portrayal of someone who seems to think he's superior to the rest of the world simply because of his affliction. The film depicts this encounter as being the source of Arbus's interest in "freaks," which is a truly banal explanation for the inspiration behind some of the greatest photographs of the 20th century. The mystery to me is why people of some talent and intelligence chose to be involved with this film in any way.

I thought that this film was awful, like stunk on ice awful. Kidman can certainly carry off the doe eyed innocent, but she can't make it interesting. Even RDJr, who is generally worth sitting through almost anything, except this, could not save this or make it worth the 2 hours and change of my life that I will never get back.

Ty Burrell was nice to see in a non-silly role, completely unlike his TV persona.

The movie was painfully boring, pretentious and self conscious to the point of being unwatchable. I must admit, I threw in the towel about 45 minutes in and watched a documentary on PBS. Time better spent.

In order to enjoy 'Fur - An imaginary portrait of Diane Arbus,' Stephen Shainberg needs the viewer to suspend all reality and prior knowledge of the American photographer, Diane Arbus. Paradoxically, it's the very use of Diane Arbus' name and knowledge to her life and work, that sets this film up to fail on a grand scale.

What becomes apparent quite early on with the casting of the beautiful WASPish and glamorous Nicole Kidman as the anti-glamorous Jewish Diane Arbus, is that Shainberg didn't get Arbus or what her work was about (unsentimental realism) and seems only attracted to Arbus on a superficial level through her photographs of circus freaks.

What follows is a kind of pretty and trivial Beauty & the Beast fantasy biopic with Robert Downey JR as Kidman's hairy fictional love interest. However, it's not the banality of the story that is the main flaw in this film, but the director's misogynistic stance that Diane Arbus, one of the art world's most singular and original woman photographers, was incapable of forming her own ideas about her work. While his previous film 'Secretary' was a study of female masochism, his continued portrayal of the female as submissive spoils this film completely - and flys in the face of the real life Diane Arbus' courage, tenacity and fearlessness in single-handedly exploring the often shady world of outsiders.

Imagine an imaginary biopic on pop star Madonna's life with Guy Richie as her Svengali, the man behind her career, and you'll get a feel of how seriously flawed and imaginary this film is: It can only work if you have absolutely no knowledge of the subject, or just choose to ignore all the facts.

It's a shame because once you remove all reference to Diane Arbus, this film could have stood up on its own as an interesting study on fetishism and a good companion piece to Secretary. 4/10