Monthly Archives: January 2016

  • Fur:  An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Steven Shainberg (2006)

    Unless it’s a wind-up, Fur – also known as Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus – must be one of the most ludicrous biographical films ever made.  (If it’s a wind-up, it’s still at least an hour too long – it runs just over two.)  The legends at the start should be refreshing (even if the twee cursive script is offputting).  We’re told not that what we’re about to see is ‘based on a true story’ but that it’s an ‘imaginary biography’ – an attempt to show the ‘inner experiences’ that shaped Diane Arbus and made her one of the twentieth century’s most famous photographers.   The screenplay, by Erin Cressida Wilson, is based on Patricia Bosworth’s non-imaginary biography of Arbus (who was born in 1923 and committed suicide in 1971).  Wilson has retained some but not all of the family details.  As in reality, Diane is married to Allan Arbus, a successful commercial photographer, and she’s from a rich New York family – her parents David and Gertrude Nemerov are in the fur trade.  Diane Arbus’s daughters, however, whose real names were Doon and Amy, are here, for some reason, called Grace and Sophie.  The film says that Allan fell in love with Diane when she was fifteen or sixteen and they were in fact married when she was only eighteen.  The events in Fur are set some seventeen years later, in 1958, and Steven Shainberg and Wilson present the thirty-five year old Arbus as variously inhibited:  frigid in the bedroom, socially scared and inept.  Her desire to become a photographer, rather than carry on as her husband’s professional and domestic helpmate, comes – to her and him – as a bolt from the blue.  This is a more significant departure from the biographical facts:  there’s no indication in the film that, from the mid-fifties onwards, Arbus had been studying with a succession of big-name photographers in the US – Berenice Abbott, Alexey Brodovitch and Lisette Model.

    You immediately wonder from those opening legends what Shainberg and Wilson mean by ‘inner experiences’.  Are we going to see events which generated these experiences – or will these events be a metaphor for the psychological journey taken by Arbus in developing her aesthetic?  In either case, it seems that we need to have some idea of Diane Arbus as an artist to provide our own context.  I knew only that she was famous for creating disturbing images of people with unusual, often grotesque faces or bodies – famous as, to put it baldly, ‘a photographer of freaks’.  Shainberg and Wilson presumably know a good deal more about Arbus but the pathos of the picture is that the film-makers’ ‘imagination’ doesn’t extend beyond the conceit that her penchant for physically bizarre humanity was inspired by her love for a man called Lionel Wheeler, who suffered from ‘hypertrichosis’ – abnormal hair growth on the body.   The Wikipedia article on hypertrichosis shows a photograph of a sufferer from a congenital form of the disease called Stephan Bibrowski, who was known as ‘Lionel the Lion-Faced Man’ and who, I assume, is the source for his namesake in Fur.   Lionel lives in the same block as the Arbuses, a few flights above.  His apartment is a little museum of abnormalities.  He appears to make his living by creating wigs out of his own surplus hair, and he introduces Diane to a freak-bohemian sub-culture in New York.  As her relationship with Lionel develops, so too do her photographic skill and daring.   She grows up or away from her husband and eventually leaves him and their children.

    What’s doubly pathetic about Fur is that in order to develop this story Shainberg and Wilson depend on ancient clichés of romantic melodrama, many of them familiar from more conventional biopics.  Because they do so, it’s virtually impossible to avoid interpreting the story literally (or at least as what-might-have-been) rather than metaphorically.  Early on in their friendship, Diane tells Lionel that, from adolescence, she’s been drawn to mortuaries, flophouses and other parts of life’s underbelly but that, rather than exploring these, she’s spent her whole adult life being a housewife.   So Lionel takes-her-to-places-she’s-never-been – although, except for a quick look at a cadaver, their encounters with the deformed or different (some of these people are abnormal only by virtue of being, for example, transvestite) are social and convivial.   Lionel suffers not only from hypertrichosis but from lung disease and, as soon as you see him with his inhaler, you know that the illness is going to be terminal.   Sure enough, the point comes when he explains that the increasingly rapid degeneration of his lungs will mean that he ends up ‘drowning’ without ever going near water.  He also tells Diane that his favourite place is the ocean.  The climax of their relationship occurs when Diane wanders one evening into Lionel’s apartment and finds him undressed.  He asks her to shave his body, which she does.   They then make love and of course she responds to Lionel in a way she’s never responded to her husband.  Diane and Lionel’s final moments together are on a beach, where he presents her with a fur coat, made from the hair she’s recently removed from him (I assumed – although the hair coat is a much darker colour) before drowning himself.   The implication is that Diane went on to do all she did as a photographer in loving memory of Lionel.

    This seems deeply insulting to the real Arbus and having Nicole Kidman play her doesn’t either tell us more or make us believe that Diane Arbus was independent-minded.  Kidman holds the screen but, as usual, her characterisation seems negligible.  When I was doing O-level English Literature, I remember the teacher getting us to develop an idea of the main characters in Far from the Madding Crowd by writing lists of adjectives to describe them.  I sometimes think of this when I see a Nicole Kidman film because, having seen it, I often struggle to come up with any adjectives for the person she’s played.  You can see what Kidman is meaning to suggest moment by moment – now she’s looking curious, now nervous, now she’s condescending (even if she’s not meaning to be:  there’s a moment here when Diane, attending one of the freak soirees with Lionel, smiles like visiting royalty at the shining mutual affection of a dwarf couple present at the gathering).  In the very last shot of Fur she is making very strenuous efforts to appear inscrutable.  But watching Nicole Kidman perform like this, I never have any sense of the woman from whom the emotions derive; I only see Kidman acting out those emotions, one by one.

    The film begins and ends with Diane’s going to spend time in, and take photographs of, a community of naturists – the story of Lionel is a bulky ‘three months earlier’ flashback enclosed within these two brief sequences.   The first of them, when Diane is interviewed by her naked hosts, a husband and wife called Jack and Tippa Henry (Boris McGiver and Marceline Hugot), is as visually arresting as anything that follows – especially the physical contrast in the moment when the ample Tippa rises from her chair and moves over to the skinny, clothed Diane to admire the locket round her neck (containing what turns out to be an infinitesimal part of Lionel’s pelt).  When, early on in the flashback story, Diane’s parents present their latest collection of furs to the public, we’re meant to see these fashions as depraved and denatured in a way that none of the human specimens that Diane meets and comes to photograph can be.  Since an audience of today, unlike one of half a century ago, is culturally conditioned to recoil from beauty-with-cruelty and not to recoil from physical deformity (even if some of us still can’t help doing so), the fur show sequence here counts for very little.  Not long after it, the preparation for Diane’s first proper sight of Lionel – the monster in the attic – begins.  This is so laborious and heavy-handed that he would need the hideousness of ten Elephant Men to justify the build-up.

    Although it was a relief to know from the start that Robert Downey Jr was under the furry make-up, the only way the role of Lionel might have worked would have been with an unknown actor.  This could have left the viewer uncertain and potentially uncomfortable.  Downey’s tawny leonine coiffure may be in acknowledgement of Lionel the Lion-Faced Man but it actually brings to mind a familiar way of presenting the Beast’s head in visualisations of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ – except that the actor’s own eyes are much less concealed here than, say, those of Jean Marais in the Cocteau film.   Since we know there’s a good-looking star actor underneath, the eventual revelation of his face and body is redundant; and, since Diane is evidently attracted to the unshaven Lionel anyway, it’s doubly redundant.  (At one point Diane’s husband (Ty Burrell) grows an impressive beard.  This might have been a witty touch but he does it before he sets eyes on Lionel so it’s presumably accidental.)   Although casting and then exposing Downey makes the film all the more ridiculous, he’s still the only thing worth watching in Fur:  he gives Lionel a droll elegance – and charm is in very short supply elsewhere in the picture.   The best performance otherwise comes from Jane Alexander, whom I’ve not seen in years, in the small role of Diane’s snobby, chilly mother.  And the only moment I laughed came when Diane’s parents meet Lionel for the first time and her gamely sociable father (Harris Yulin) smiles and says, ‘Pleased to meet you’, although through gritted teeth.

    Shainberg and Wilson seem unaware that the last act of their ‘tribute to Diane’ disparages Arbus’s imaginative sensibility.  The implication of their one night of physical love is that Diane realises that, beneath his fur, Lionel is beautiful; but Arbus the photographer surely saw human bodies conventionally regarded as grotesque as having their own beauty rather than as imprisoning a beautiful ‘inner person’.  Diane’s having sex with Lionel doesn’t mean much if he’s not the uniquely hirsute Lionel.   It’s a laughable copout to take on this ‘challenging’ subject then render it in ways that seem designed not just to reduce the audience’s discomfort to a minimum but to reproduce the tropes and mechanisms of a formula weeper:  the love story where one of the gloriously doomed couple dies but lives on in the survivor.

    20 December 2009

  • Far from Heaven

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Todd Haynes (2002)

    Far from Heaven is a technically elaborate pastiche of Hollywood domestic-romantic melodramas of the early post-World War II period.  The colouring of the images, the settings, the costumes, the score, the character types – all these elements evoke an America that appeared on cinema screens in the 1950s and, in particular, the movies of a Hollywood outsider, the German émigré Douglas Sirk.  The plot of Far from Heaven is inspired by Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows; the title of Todd Haynes’s movie nods to this.  In All That Heaven Allows, the romance that develops between the characters played by Jane Wyman and Rock Hudson – she’s a well-off New England widow, he’s a tree surgeon – is deplored by her family and friends because of the differences in the couple’s ages and social standing.  In Far from Heaven, set in Hartford, Connecticut in 1957, Cathy Whitaker (Julianne Moore) and her husband Frank (Dennis Quaid) appear to be the ideal middle-class suburban couple.  They have a bright young son (Ryan Ward) and daughter (Lindsay Andretta).  Frank has a high-powered management job at Magnatech, a company selling television advertising.  Cathy is beautiful, socially busy and accomplished, and the perfect homemaker.

    Her world is turned upside down when she calls in at her husband’s office one evening to find him hugging and kissing another man.  Frank is always working late:  it turns out his extra hours are usually spent not at Magnatech but in Hartford’s gay bars.  The Whitakers seek medical treatment for Frank’s homosexual desires.  In the meantime, Cathy strikes up a friendship with Raymond Deagan, the son of the Whitakers’ recently deceased gardener.  A widower with a young daughter, Raymond has taken over his father’s business.  He not only cultivates; he’s cultivated too – the first time Cathy meets him outside her garden is at a modern art exhibition.  Raymond (Dennis Haysbert) is also black.  Cathy Whitaker soon discovers that being seen in public with him is as appalling to the social circle to which she belongs as discovering the truth of Frank’s sexuality was to her.

    The reappraisal of Douglas Sirk’s work in Hollywood began in Cahiers du cinéma in 1967.  Critical analysis in the years that followed ‘revealed an oblique criticism of American society hidden beneath a banal façade of plotting conventional for the era – Sirk’s films were now seen as masterpieces of irony’.  (His admirers among other film-makers included Rainer Werner Fassbinder, whose Fear Eats the Soul also derives from All That Heaven Allows and, nearly thirty years before Far from Heaven, incorporated an interracial element in the central relationship.)  According to Roger Ebert, ‘To appreciate a film like Written on the Wind probably takes more sophistication than to understand one of Ingmar Bergman’s masterpieces, because Bergman’s themes are visible and underlined, while with Sirk the style conceals the message’.  I don’t get this reading of the films in question.  I can’t see, for example, how the criticism of the conventional attitudes of those who condemn the Jane Wyman-Rock Hudson relationship in All That Heaven Allows is ‘oblique’:  it’s explicit, not to say obvious.  Yet Sirk’s work continues to be admired for its expressionist elements.  In a June 2014 discussion of All That Heaven Allows on the Dissolve website[1], one of the contributors notes as follows:

    ‘There’s no mistaking that Universal backlot for a real suburban street, and I’m sure some modern viewers scoff at the overtly artificial sets.  But All That Heaven Allows’ synthetic suburbia works as another facet of Sirk’s critique of 1950s society.  The falseness of the town’s storefronts and houses echoes the falseness of its residents, who put on facades of class and manners to hide their contempt for those they look on as inferior or different.  All That Heaven Allows’ setting looks fake because in Sirk’s view, small-town America is fake, a lie that far too many snooty, stuck-up people have bought into.’

    The key word here is ‘echoes’.  The supposedly expressionistic quality of the suburban sets may well resonate with the suburban mindset that Sirk critiques – but that mindset is reflected too in the looks and words of the movie’s minor characters.

    Roger Ebert’s assertion that Written on the Wind is written in a code links to another piece of received wisdom about Sirk:  that the subtexts of his movies contain elements too controversial to be realised on screen in 1950s Hollywood.  I struggle to understand this too:  the issue of social and age difference is salient in All That Heaven Allows; Sirk’s last feature film, Imitation of Life (1959), is all about race, class and gender.  The idea of taboo subjects is, nevertheless, a crucial premise of Far from Heaven; and the homosexual element introduced by Todd Haynes – because this is an area that mainstream 1950s movies steered clear of – gives substance to the all-that-Hollywood-allowed perspective.

    It’s at least arguable that the social critique in Douglas Sirk’s melodramas is, through the inclusion of overt as well as covert indicators, tautologous.  When I saw Far from Heaven on its original release, I felt the effect of bringing to the surface elements that might have been cryptic in films of the 1950s was unarguably tautologous.  Seeing the movie again, thirteen years on, hasn’t changed my mind and I still felt an antipathy towards the film’s cleverness.  Yet I was more impressed by it on this second viewing.  Parts of Haynes’s pastiche are satirical while others are more simply imitative – Elmer Bernstein’s accomplished score is among the latter elements.  There’s variety too in the satirical approaches – in the ways that Todd Haynes plays with 1950s Hollywood commissions and omissions (there are times when you feel the director is playing with himself).  A scene in which Cathy’s giggling friends compare notes on how often they have sex with their husbands is an instance of a conversation that wouldn’t have occurred in a fifties Hollywood product but which is placed here in a flawless visualisation of that product.  The sequences which feature a doctor who expounds on the aetiology and possibilities for medical treatment of Frank’s ‘unnatural’ feelings skewer contemporary attitudes towards homosexuality.  (James Rebhorn plays the doctor with fine judgment – he manages to evoke omniscient screen medics of another era and ground the man in reality at the same time.)  Haynes’s realisation of the other queer elements of the story is different again.  The look of the people in and the movement of the camera around a bar that Frank frequents express fascination and horror:  the place is being observed by a censorious 1950s perspective and filmed according to Hollywood melodrama conventions of the time.  Haynes’s exposure of the smiling falsity of the perfect family unit is obvious in the early stages but the tone darkens and deepens as Cathy’s and Frank’s marriage becomes thoroughly wretched.  The couple go for a new-start holiday to Florida, where Frank falls for a young man for whom he leaves Cathy (he subsequently divorces her).  Haynes gives the gay bits in Florida a tingling depravity which, although it’s coherent with the register of the earlier gay bar scene, is excessive.  It briefly tips the film into comedy.

    There are things too in Far from Heaven that you hope are meant to have satirical intent but which may be merely weak.  At the art exhibition, Raymond explains Miró to Cathy:  is Todd Haynes lampooning movies – post-1950s ones – in which the high intelligence of an African-American character is meant to take white characters, and the white audience, by surprise?  Or is the virtual idealisation of Dennis Haysbert’s Raymond – patient, perceptive, gently witty, a dutiful son, a loving and protective father – itself an example of moral simplification of (in effect, condescension towards) a black character?  Raymond’s daughter Sarah (Jordan Puryear) is verbally abused then chased by some white boys, one of whom throws a lump of rock at her:  Sarah is knocked unconscious and hospitalised.  This happens while Cathy and Frank are in Florida:  when they return home, their son can’t wait to tell them about the incident, which involves his classmates.  His mother deplores what may have been the racist intent of the attack but, for all her sensitivity about Raymond, Cathy doesn’t ask any more about the injured girl.  Weeks later, Cathy discovers who she was and takes her maid Sybil to task for not telling her sooner.  (As Sybil, Viola Davis is eloquent though under-used.)  Perhaps Haynes is demonstrating here the unconvincing plotting of Hollywood melodramas of the 1950s; if so, he’s doing so in a way that’s remarkably convenient.  It suits his dramatic purposes artificially to delay Cathy’s discovery about Sarah until this later point in the story.  The kids who play the Whitakers’ children are puzzlingly different.  As David, Ryan Ward is so wooden that he comes over as a parody of bad child acting of decades past.  As his sister Janice, Lindsay Andretta is a child actor of the twenty-first century, playing a young girl in a 1950s story in a straightforwardly naturalistic way.  (Ward and Andretta, now in their twenties, are both still acting, according to IMDb.)

    While Todd Haynes seems to luxuriate in the rich, gorgeous design and colouring, these sometimes verge on suffocating the people on the screen.  There’s a moment, for example, when Cathy’s friend Eleanor (excellent Patricia Clarkson) stands in the Whitakers’ front porch and the tones of her outfit are perfectly co-ordinated with those of the autumn foliage in the trees behind her.  Edward Lachman’s superb lighting intensifies the visual beauty of the composition but the colour scheme in the shot is so comprehensive that it seems inescapable – Haynes achieves a sense of people inextricably bound to their place and time.  There’s also a forceful traction in Far from Heaven between characters trapped in a 1950s Hollywood world that didn’t acknowledge gay or interracial relationships, and actors trapped in Todd Haynes’s ingenious reconstruction of that world.  This is especially true of Julianne Moore as Cathy.  Although that moment in which Eleanor’s wardrobe and the natural world join forces is strongly suggestive, the character herself doesn’t consciously suffer feelings of claustrophobia – her prejudices remain largely intact over the course of the story.  In contrast, Cathy’s very personal experiences force her to think below the surfaces and beyond the limits of her life.  Dennis Quaid’s Frank looks racked by guilt from the word go – and few viewers will put his hollow-cheeked, exhausted appearance down to working too hard at the office, as Cathy does.  But Quaid is allowed, in due course, to explode out of Haynes’s movie-history framework: first, through Frank’s losing his temper in a big way (Quaid does this powerfully); eventually, through his decision to live with another man.  Julianne Moore’s Cathy doesn’t get these opportunities and the unresolved tension that results is compelling.  BFI put on a Todd Haynes season this month to coincide with the release of Carol.  My main reason for going back to Far from Heaven was to compare it with the new film and my immediate reaction, after seeing Carol, was to think it was superior.  After watching Far from Heaven again, a few days later, I’m not so sure.  Carol is a beautifully smooth piece of film-making but it lacks the friction of this earlier work.

    9 December 2015

    [1]  http://tinyurl.com/h9q52cu

     

     

     

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