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.

Movie: "Harry Brown" (dir. Daniel Barber)

Harry Brown belongs to the ever-popular genre of revenge movies, in which one man finally snaps and turns vigilante on the thugs who have destroyed his life. In this case, Michael Caine does a fine job portraying a retired British pensioner and war veteran living in cheap high-rises overrun by violent young delinquents. "Delinquents" is too soft a word, because these villains are more horrifying than usual--but at the same time, it feels appropriate because so much stress is laid in the movie on the generational gaps separating Caine (and his terrified chess partner) from the teenage nihilists who control his neighborhood. When Caine finally decides to strike back, his initial vulnerability and hesitance are overcome by the utter atrocity of the drug lords and hoppers around him.

This atrocity is, more than anything, what sets Harry Brown apart from the various related genre pieces that it samples liberally. Plotwise, this is more or less a British Gran Torino without any comedy or redemption; some of the drug lords look a lot like the infected from 28 Days Later (which helps heighten their brutal inhumanity); and the sense of an anonymous evil force is emphasized by scenes of invisible high-rise residents showering goods on the police that come straight out of The Wire.

If all these echoes make Harry Brown sound less original than it might have been, the movie still comes together into an entertaining and disturbing whole that adds something to the genre. Caine's performance is offset by Emily Mortimer's kindly but rule-bound detective, whose almost maternal pity for Brown struggles against her dawning awareness of his vigilantism--an emotional complication that provides a suspenseful counterpoint to the one-man shoot-'em-up storyline.

Furthermore, part of what makes it interesting is what it shares with a movie like Gran Torino. Both movies go out of their way to stage the revenge plot as a conflict between a now feeble, grandfatherly man and a pack of dangerously undisciplined youth. They seem to be defining a specific sub-genre of revenge flick, one troubled by the idea that old-fashioned father figures are disappearing only to be replaced by bureaucrats and kind souls inadequate to the task at hand. Unable to come to any easy solution, they bring back Father for one last high-caliber and riveting metaphorical spanking.