Gary
Dretzka
Leonard
Klady
David
Poland
Doug
Pratt
Ray Pride
Patricia Vidal
Fur
An Imaginary Portrait
of Diane Arbus
Directed
by Steven Shainberg
Several false starts preceded this paragraph on Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, the second collaboration, after girl-popular S&M soaper Secretary, between director Steven Shainberg (Hit Me) and writer Erin Cressida Wilson. (None of them are imaginary but all were more splenetic than this one.) Drawing from Patricia Bosworth’s biography of the famed photographer and suicide (for which Shainberg’s uncle, Lawrence Shainberg, was a major source), Shainberg and Wilson work up phantasmagorical versions of the artistic libel that Arbus’ work is about cruelty and perversion. (Arbus’ estate denied any employment whatsoever of her imagery, but there are Mary Ellen Mark and Matt Mahurin photographs strewn about.)
This uneasily confected
"Arbus" discovers her muse in the form of a mysterious new upstairs
tenant whose body is covered with fur, a precious wolf-boy played by Robert
Downey, Jr. with belladonna-wide eyes. He introduces her to midgets
and marijuana, to masochists and dominatrixes, and kewpie-wide eyes are
opened wider. As in Secretary, the bold production design suggests a Lower
East Side boutique afflicted with unsightly gigantism. David Lynch
is already David Lynch, and the Rev. Charles Dodgson beat
Fur to many of its pallid, pulled punches. The final shot, like that of
another ambitious, hermetic Nicole Kidman vehicle, Birth, is perfect in
its own way, but neither shot is earned by the movies that precede them.
(A similar criticism I have of the final five minutes of Secretary,
which are cogent in a way different from the rest of that movie.) Carter
Burwell’s gorgeous score will make a lovely soundtrack album.
Bill Pope, whose credits include The Matrix trilogy, shoots
and frames beautifully, but the wallpaper and the bold costumes keep getting
in the way. Oh, and the relentless borrows from Jean Cocteau’s
Belle et la bete (Beauty and the Beast). The only bete here,
however, is noir: This is a stinker that gives ambition an unusually high
order of odor.
