Faux Fur

Say "Cheese!": Diane Arbus (Nicole Kidman) works behind the camera with her husband Allan (Ty Burrell) in Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus.

For moviegoers, the arrival of the holiday season isn’t marked by the first Christmas lights or the final disintegration of the pumpkin in the yard; it is announced with a monster soundtrack, black-and-white flashbacks and artistic compromise. Yes, ‘tis the season of the biopic. Every Christmas for the past few years, there has been at least one film that stuffs the cradle-to-grave experience of a real person into two (usually much, much longer) hours. Kinsey, Ray and Walk the Line are all unobjectionable, awkward films that laboured beneath good intentions. In the movie biography, a full life invariably emerges half-cooked.

With that in mind, it’s hard to fault a biopic that’s trying to wriggle free of the genre’s limitations. Fur is, as the subtitle puts it somewhat lumpily, An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus. Director Steven Shainberg (Secretary) aims to show the famed photographer’s shift from Park Avenue princess to court artist of the demimonde as it occurred on the inside, not on the outside. Rather than depicting her childhood or her famous suicide in 1971 at age 48, he attempts to chart an undocumented (and undocumentable), hypothetical transformation: the few months in 1958 when Arbus’s inner housewife broke her domestic chains and walked away an artist.

Arbus’s square black and white portraits of “freaks” (her word, and theirs, at the time) may be in danger of losing their initial breath-sucking impact. Her cave-eyed twins and angry Mexican dwarves are so widely known (a 2005 career overview at the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Art in New York drew massive lineups, and her photos have sold for half a million dollars), and so imitated, that one fears stumbling across them on Kleenex boxes next to Monet’s Waterlillies. Yet, even as these highly uncommon images inch towards the common, they remain jolting and beautifully uncanny, a blunt reminder that we are still so surprised by difference.

Shainberg wants to make an homage to the eerie mood of Arbus’s work, but the mess that is Fur only serves to remind us how hard it is to do weird right. Regardless of the fact that he’s trying to throw the book out the window, the book keeps coming back. Flights of fancy aside, Shainberg (working from a script by Erin Cressida Wilson) anchors the story with actual facts from Patricia Bosworth’s seminal biography, Diane Arbus: A Biography. Arbus came from a privileged New York background; her parents ran a department store called Russeks, specializing in furs. At 18, she married young photographer Allan Arbus (played with historically accurate gentleness by Ty Burrell). While Allan stayed behind the camera, Diane helped primp and compose editorial and advertising shots of mechanical-bride-appliance-orgasm-bliss to appear in women’s magazines. But the ’60s are breathing down her neck: as Diane, Nicole Kidman looks as if her ribs are cracking beneath her cinched dresses. She is suffering Betty Friedan’s “problem that has no name,” caring for her children and propping up her loving husband with all the enthusiasm of a robot butler. “You should really take some pictures,” says Allan, sincerely worried for his wife’s sanity. But what could she possibly photograph, she demurs?

Beauty and the Beast: Arbus walks on the wild side with her friend Lionel (Robert Downey Jr.). (Abbot Genser/Odeon Films).

From this rather conventional psychological setup, Shainberg begins his diversion into Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a reference dropped so often it bounces (Arbus’s daughter actually asks to read the book). Holding Arbus’s hand down the rabbit hole is new upstairs neighbour, Lionel (Robert Downey Jr.), who suffers from a rare condition that makes him Beast to her Beauty: he is covered head to toe in fur. Handfuls of his hair clog Arbus’s drain, providing an excuse for her to walk up the paint-peeled staircase and knock on the door. (For future reference, “I found some…hair” is a much more original introduction strategy than asking to borrow a cup of sugar.) Lionel is a wig-maker and his apartment is filled with creepy cloth mannequins and burlap facemasks: it’s like some art school party you wish you hadn’t attended (the kind that might have Diane Arbus posters on the wall). Freud talks about the charged symbolism of hair as the final barrier between the world and the sex organs, and certainly, Diane is immediately breathless in Lionel’s presence, quickly saying good night to her family and going off into the dark city at his invitation. There, she watches dominatrixes waltzing and giants playing poker. She wakes up.

The film unspools far too slowly, but it looks good doing so: every surface is crowded with unidentifiable, tactile weirdness. Lionel and Arbus are friends, but as the relationship slid toward something sexual, I began to feel irritated: Shainberg is trying to sell a version of Arbus’s life in which her genius is due to a man. A furry, Chewbacca-like, imaginary man (no Lionel existed), true, but still a man, and a less hirsute version of this trend is frustratingly common in films about female artists. I call it the ampersand phenomenon. Diego Rivera got so much screen time in the movie Frida, about Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, that it could have been called Frida & Diego. Iris, about British author Iris Murdoch, is really Iris & John. Sylvia, about American poet Sylvia Plath, is really Sylvia & Ted. Of course, these men had profound influence on these women, but in the end, the hand that puts pen to paper and the brush to canvas acts alone, moved by a thousand muses. Why do filmmakers find it so hard to make movies about women artists that don’t turn their entire lives into love stories? Pollock could never be called Pollock & Krasner: Jackson Pollock found inspiration everywhere, including the inexplicable depths of his soul, not solely in his wife, Lee Krasner.

Gallingly, Downey’s fictional furball is credited with making the brave decisions that the real Arbus had to make on her own to become the significant artist she was. Lionel coaches her on how to see the world, a tool more important to a photographer than a camera. He counsels her to leave her Hasselblad at home and embrace experience; the art will come after the living. Kidman plays Arbus with a weak, quivering quality, as if she absolutely would not have had the strength to create without Lionel’s love. But Lionel is a fiction, and Arbus did make art — marvelous, shocking art. Fur sheds little light on how. Shainberg may be working with metaphor — Lionel is a symbol of the underground that consumed her, etc. — but what a bad metaphor. He has replaced a literal depiction with something clumsy and historically loaded: he has made Diane Arbus the girlfriend character in a movie about a Muppet.

The film makes a second massive misstep in a laughably earnest scene where Arbus shaves Lionel. She’s got a lot of acreage to cover in the pre-Mach 3 era, and it takes a while. Only when he’s clean-shaven does she have sex with him, and only then does she take his picture. Both events are orchestrated by Lionel. Where is Diane Arbus at the moment where she takes her first portrait? Where is that world-changing nerve? Arbus demanded we confront the weird, the abnormal, the hairy and horny, and look these people in the eye, where perhaps we might see ourselves. Fur fears confrontation so much that it forces the freak to “pass” before he gets a kiss from Nicole Kidman. The film is an audacious cop-out, an attempted antidote to the illness of the biopic that’s just icky. And the ick is something Arbus refused to let us feel.

Fur opens in Vancouver and Montreal on Nov. 17. The film opens in Toronto on Dec. 29.

Katrina Onstad writes about the arts for CBC.ca.

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