Movie: "Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus" (dir. Steven Shainberg, 2006)

"Fur" is intended, not as an accurate biopic, but as "an imaginary portrait" of the photographer's "inner experience," a text warns at the beginning of the film. I've never read Patricia Bosworth's biography of Diane Arbus--which supposedly inspired Erin Cressida Wilson to write "Fur"--so it's hard to judge how accurately the photographer's psyche is rendered here. But even apart from any standard of truth, the story told by "Fur" has its advantages--and shortcomings.

The biggest liberty taken in the film is the invention of Lionel Sweeney (Robert Downey, Jr.), a man who moves into an apartment above Arbus (Nicole Kidman) and her family. Lionel, who suffers from hypertrichosis--a disease that covers his entire body and face in hair--introduces Arbus to his social circle of freaks and outcasts, which gives her the courage to take up photography outside the oppressive constraints of her husband's photography studio.

The first thing to note about "Fur" is that it is gorgeous--visually and aurally, it is richly sensual, and every performance in the film is striking. The writer-director team of Wilson and Shainberg also deserves credit for pushing the envelope on themes of fear, violence, and sexuality, as they did in their earlier collaboration, "Secretary." Arbus's pleasurable and even sexual fascination with things that frighten her makes "Fur" interesting. That interest is partially undercut, however, by a storyline that we all know too well: female free spirit suffers under domestic oppression until a surprising, risky experience reveals the magical world she has been missing. It doesn't help that Kidman played Virginia Woolf in "The Hours," which also capitalized on the same old story of which Woolf--with her repressive upbringing, marriage, artistic awakening, and final conflicted suicide--is such a convenient example. It's the stuff of a simplified Woolf biography, or of Kate Chopin's "The Awakening," or of Gilbert and Gubar's Madwoman in the Attic: the story of female originality suffering under restraint is beginning to feel unoriginal and, in fact, restraining.

There's also something unrealistic about the way "Fur" portrays freakishness--as if abnormality, like normality, were an actual "thing," a common code that could unite a community. To paraphrase Tolstoy, normal people are all alike, but every abnormal person is abnormal in their own way. What makes Arbus's body of work so interesting is that she managed to make everyone look freakish, an accomplishment that said very little about the world and very much about the workings of her own mind. By embodying freakishness in the figure of Lionel and his community of freaks who all somehow know and like each other, "Fur" turns Arbus from an expressionist--someone who shared her own nightmarish ideas of the world--into a reporter on a lovably off-kilter world already in existence.

What I can't decide is whether or not this transformation was intentional. As Susan Sontag notes in On Photography, Arbus herself talked about her work this way, acting as though her subjects were always as strange as they are in her portrayals, talking about them with "the childlike wonder of the pop mentality." So far as I can tell, then, "Fur" does seem to paint an accurate picture of the way Arbus described her "inner experience"; the problem is that Arbus's descriptions don't match up with her actual project. So to see Arbus's work from the inside is almost necessarily to misunderstand it as a kind of delightful vacation to a strange world. This movie beautifully renders that misunderstanding, but without context, it threatens to propagate and popularize an unrealistically uplifting ideal of her life and photographs. The most obvious limitation of this take on her work is that it renders her eventual suicide almost incomprehensible--and indeed, "Fur" ends without mentioning it.