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