Word: furness
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...Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus Directed by Steven Shainberg Picturehouse 1.5 Stars Move over, Martha Stewart—exotic is the new plain, and weird is the new normal. Unfortunately, each is proving that it can be just as boring as its predecessor. “Taking the center from the margins” seems to be the raison d’être of several of the best films produced in culture-war-America over the past year, from the spectacular “Brokeback Mountain” to the delightful “Little Miss Sunshine...
According to the credits Fur is "inspired" by Patricia Bosworth's sober, well-researched and touching 1984 biography of Diane Arbus, the photographer who specialized in making indelible images of the freakish-giants, dwarfs, Siamese twins and the like-in mid-20th century America. The filmmakers, in an on-screen foreword, say that what we are about to see is "a film that invents characters and situations that reach beyond reality to express what might have been Arbus' inner experience on her extraordinary path...
...conflations in their attempts to give coherence and dramatic impact to messy and ambiguous lives. We don't go to such films in search of full factual accuracy. Generally, we want inspiration from them, a sense that we can take meaning, even moral instruction, from the life on view. Fur, however, raises these stakes. It invents an entirely imaginary figure-a grotesquely hirsute man-and brings him to the center of the story. Where he serves as the beast to Diane's beauty, horrifying her, titillating her, then enlisting her sympathetic curiosity and, finally, her love. Once Diane (Nicole Kidman...
...style with which to express it. Lionel not only supplies her first inspirational frisson, but also introduces her to the circle of freaks with whom he consorts, thus providing her with the subjects-and the obsession-that would rule his career. The fact that he is covered in fur also provides her with a rebellious cross-reference; her domineering parents were, in fact, famous New York furriers...
...latter is not a word anyone would want to apply to Fur. Or perhaps to any movie as inherently corrupt as this one is. On the one hand, it wants to bandy a famous name about-although what value a cult figure like Arbus has, for the movie audience, even the one that gathers in the upscale specialty theaters, is problematic. On the other hand, it wants to be free to sensationally reinvent her life, mainly in order to provide the audience with images that are simultaneously revolting and sentimental. We're supposed to draw back aghast from the close...