Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus Reviews
Top Critic[The] film illuminates Arbus' artistically brilliant, emotionally unstable life for no longer than the popping of a flash bulb.
Stilted, stylized and art-directed within an inch of its life, Shainberg's movie (which was written by his Secretary collaborator, Erin Cressida Wilson) manages to be both oppressively literal and fatefully fuzzy at the same time.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
Don't be fooled for a second by that subtitle. Fur bills itself as An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus, but this thing's got all the imagination of a career bureaucrat slumped in his cubicle awaiting a pension.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Shainberg neither sugarcoats [Diane Arbus's] distance from her girls nor judges it. The filmmakers understand Arbus's story within the context of her time and upbringing.
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| Original Score: 3/4
The world created by Shainberg never seems strange or real enough to convince us that we're getting the goods on anything. Put another way, this imaginary portrait might have done better had it stuck closer to reality.
| Original Score: C
[Arbus's] most famous images still have the power to shock, hanging as they do on the walls of the world's museums. Fur, the movie about her, reaches for that same jolt and settles instead for a raised eyebrow.
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| Original Score: 3/5
Not a single frame of Fur conveys Arbus's distinctive vision ...
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| Original Score: F
Much of the film is absurdist nonsense, and its symbolism is of the plank-to-the-head variety.
| Original Score: 2.5/4
As a biopic, it is as meretricious as most, but as a myth about love and loss, about otherness and identity, about compassion and revulsion, about fetishism and sex, about art and life, it will likely stay with you for days.
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| Original Score: 4/5
The movie officially becomes the one thing Arbus's photography refused to be: normal.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Arbus's life has been put through the fantasy blender.
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| Original Score: C-
If the movie is highly unlikely to connect with all who see it, it will connect on a deep level to some who do, in no small part because of Kidman's committed, even daring performance.
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| Original Score: 3/4
This fractured beauty-and-the-beast fairytale comes off disturbingly simple-minded.
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| Original Score: C
Arbus (whose actual work is unseen, presumably because of rights issues) remains an enigma, and Kidman's wispy portrayal doesn't give the film the center it needs.
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| Original Score: 2/4
The film takes enormous liberties by embellishing one small aspect of her life to the point of silliness.
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| Original Score: 1/4
Purists will howl at the liberties Shainberg has taken with the facts, but there's a bravery to Fur, an uncompromising commitment to its narrow focus -- of one woman's creative birth -- that rhymes with Arbus's own artistic courage.
Its nerviness only pays off in a few details and in Nicole Kidman's resourcefulness -- mainly a way of suggesting morbid curiosity as erotic stimulation, though the script manages to find diverse excuses for undressing her.
A revelatory, challenging and deeply affecting portrait, anchored by what may be Kidman's most profoundly moving performance to date.
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| Original Score: 3/4
I found it to be heavy-handed, pretentious dreck.
My irritation progressed through contempt, eye-rolling, and, finally, a dull despair illuminated only by the imminent prospect of dinner.
Fur is a folly, though not a dishonorable one.
| Original Score: 2/5
It only does to the artist what museums have tried to do to her art, putting her in a neat little frame and sticking her on the wall, another exhibit in the sideshow. And it still leaves us, safe and separate, stranded on the other side of the glass.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Like the artists who stock the Whitney Biennial with their plastic puddles of vomit, Fur works feverishly to dress up clichés.
| Original Score: 1.5/4
Both in art and in death, Arbus escaped the demeaning constraints of society. By envisioning her as a flawlessly gorgeous mouse with no will of her own, [director] Shainberg and [screenwriter] Wilson have dragged her back.
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| Original Score: 2/4
If you are seeking illumination about Arbus' artistry or her psyche, it's not here.
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| Original Score: 2/4
Fur starts stylishly, and confidently, but the film dwindles down to a chamber piece in a claustrophobic chamber.
It remains simultaneously too far-fetched and thesis-driven to be convincing and too feelingly done to be ignored.
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| Original Score: 3/5
If so blatant a fiction is placed in a co-starring role into an account of a real life what can you usefully take away from the movie?
Fur's misstep, and it is significant, is in the creature design of Lionel. The resemblance to Chewbacca is uncanny. He also looks a little like Lon Chaney's Wolf Man.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Freighted with a risible air of pretension and gloom.
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| Original Score: 1.5/4
Is it more interesting and entertaining than a straightforward biopic of Arbus would have been? Maybe. Is it more illuminating? Probably not.
It's been a while since we saw a truly boggling sophomore slump, one of those infamous second-act follies, like Steven Soderbergh's Kafka, made by adirector blinded with ego and overreach.
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| Original Score: D-
Fur may not be entirely convincing, but it's made with a conviction that deserves respect.
The paperback edition of Patricia Bosworth's mesmerizing book is being published again this week. My advice is forget about the movie and grab this literary gem fast. You will really learn something. You will learn nothing from Fur.
You won't learn much about Arbus, aside from the correct pronunciation of her first name; you will get to see Kidman try (and fail) to find her inner freak.
You'd expect a conventional biopic to be bland and overly telescoped. But Arbus's life and work ought to inspire something more than the generic tale of a repressed fifties doll wife who runs off with the circus.
The filmmakers behind Fur sentimentalize Arbus, bringing her back into the comfort zone of a woman who is more sensitive than other people to the trials of the unfortunate -- exactly the kind of soft fifties liberalism that she knocked to pieces.
Impressively crafted and acted but far too narrowly and benignly conceived to satisfy even on its own terms.
The movie feels like it's still in the darkroom.
| Original Score: 2/4
An affected fantasia that unsuccessfully tries to conjure Diane Arbus out of a strident urban fairy tale.
