I wanted so much to find Fur: An Imaguinary Portrait of Diane Arbus a great movie that it slightly pains me to only say it's a pretty ambitious if faulty affair. It's a wondrously designed picture, dark and moody and cold and with the kinds of "freaks" that Tod Browning left behind for their lack of enthusiasm. It also has a strangely affecting performance of sorts from Robert Downey Jr who for the bulk of the running time is covered from head to toe in hair (his get-up makes one think back to both the Lion in Wizard of Oz, not simply his name being 'Lionel' and Chewbacca with extra soul and melancholy). What gets in the way of the potency of the message about escaping into a netherworld to create is the meandering tone for a lot of the picture, that for all of the surreal tricks up director Sheinberg's handle a lot of the time Diane is just hanging out with Lionel and his group of circus folk.
There's also a cold tone to the picture that for all its moments of inspiration can't quite shake off. Nicole Kidman is integral to this facet of the picture as the title character, who in the late 50s broke away from her conventional portrait photographer husband who had a successful business to find herself in artistic expression. Her performance is effective but nowhere near as much as her male counterparts (her husband, played by Ty Burell as well becoming a shell of person as the film goes on in bearded form), and maybe because she has that same sullen, whispering-sounding voice that is meant to show us she's breaking bit by bit from her cocoon of 50s complacency, and it's sometimes oddly one-note. Sheinberg does what he can with a careful and quietly inventive mis-en-scene, and like Secretary is intuitive to that unspoken facet to people who just can barely connect out of their shells (there's also one of the best scenes, and most erotic, where Diane cuts Lione's hair off for the portrait).
It's not that the picture is entirely too strange, or that it is entirely ineffective, or even that the performances don't strike a chord. But there's something about Fur that loses its way, where we get led astray from the curious corridors early on- not to mention Lione's 'WTF' apartment of wonderment- into something that feels familiar in a creepy way. It is, in a word, dreary.
There's also a cold tone to the picture that for all its moments of inspiration can't quite shake off. Nicole Kidman is integral to this facet of the picture as the title character, who in the late 50s broke away from her conventional portrait photographer husband who had a successful business to find herself in artistic expression. Her performance is effective but nowhere near as much as her male counterparts (her husband, played by Ty Burell as well becoming a shell of person as the film goes on in bearded form), and maybe because she has that same sullen, whispering-sounding voice that is meant to show us she's breaking bit by bit from her cocoon of 50s complacency, and it's sometimes oddly one-note. Sheinberg does what he can with a careful and quietly inventive mis-en-scene, and like Secretary is intuitive to that unspoken facet to people who just can barely connect out of their shells (there's also one of the best scenes, and most erotic, where Diane cuts Lione's hair off for the portrait).
It's not that the picture is entirely too strange, or that it is entirely ineffective, or even that the performances don't strike a chord. But there's something about Fur that loses its way, where we get led astray from the curious corridors early on- not to mention Lione's 'WTF' apartment of wonderment- into something that feels familiar in a creepy way. It is, in a word, dreary.