I watched the movie Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, and it has many flaws as a movie itself. The biggest complaint for this movie is the pace is drastically slow and the characters have very little life. The first 42 minutes of the movie are borderline irrelevant and could be cut down to 15 and still give you all the information it needs. The most intriguing character is Lionel (Robert Downey Jr.) and even he is somewhat of an underwhelming presence. He was born with a disease that makes him grow hair all over his body at a rapid pace. A very exciting character on the outside but very underwhelming on the inside. Diane Arbus (Nicole Kidman) as a character has no qualities to her that is exciting or make you feel for her. Also her husband, who we should be feeling sympathy and loathing towards, you feel nothing. The emotional aspect of this movie is completely lost.
After reading about the real Diane Arbus, I learned how misrepresented she was in this movie. She was portrayed as a dull woman with an obsession for the grotesque and freakish. The real Diane did have a love for the oddities of the world but was by no means this drab and lifeless of a character. The addition of a fake lover in Lionel to convey her love for people who were born with abnormalities is a horrible way to show this. There are no any reports of her having physical relations with these freaks, if anything she was in love with how it made other people feel and the thoughts it put into one’s head. Arbus was equally disgusted and in awe of, but by no means in love with or sexually attracted to them, so adding Lionel as one of the main protagonists in this movie is not only boring but it is inaccurate.
Arbus did almost all of her work after divorcing her husband yet the entire movie takes place while she is still with her husband. This movie barely shows any of Arbus’ work and it most definitely does not convey the impact she has made in the world of photography. We barely see if any of Diane’s work in this movie. This is not even a movie about art it’s a movie about a fake love. This movie should have added more of her work, shown less of a fake love story, and more of her time going out and finding the oddities that made her famous.
The movie ends in a way that can almost make you feel a bit happy. Diane’s life, however, did not end like that, she committed suicide at the age of 48. The movie portrayed her life like a fairytale when her life was all too real. When you look at one of Diane’s photographs you are sent into a deep thought wondering about life. She is provoking your thoughts and possibly offending you or exciting you. This movie did neither of these things for me. You are not left with an uneasy feeling in your stomach or a flutter in your heart, and if you knew the life of Diane Arbus you would be ashamed of this movie. If you did not know her life you would just be left bored.
It is a stretch to be able to talk about the art works in this movie because there were very few. For the first hour of the movie it is only Diane’s husband Allen who was doing any of the photography work. You get a brief glimpse into some of her style of work when she first arrives into Lionel’s home and the camera shows pictures of transsexual women, tattooed men, and people with enlarged limbs. Just like Diane’s work, this left you wanting to see more. But, sadly you never really do, you are left with Lionel, an imaginary character who has a disease that makes him grow hair like a dog.
In one of the endings scenes it does kind of show what Diane’s work in real life may have been trying to do. In the end when Diane shaves Lionel and it reveals his body and the face of a regular man it shows that these “freaks” may not be freaks at all. It shows that even though the outside may be ugly, distorted, or mutilated, underneath all that there is still a human being. This scene is one of the few scenes that I think represents Arbus’ true thought process. It makes you think “what if I looked like that but had the same mind and soul.” It makes you think how different life would be just because you aren’t like everyone else on the outside. It’s unfortunate that this movie does not have more scenes like this one.
