Fur

Fur, a movie by Steven Shainberg (Secretary), is a fictional biopic on the photographer Diane Arbus. The fictional biopic thing is what interested me the most. It's not actually about Diane Arbus, but a bunch of made up events that might have pushed her to make her superb photography. Fur stars Nicole Kidman as Diane Arbus and Robert Downey Jr as her hypertrichosis-stricken neighbor one floor up. Hypertrichosis is the "werewolf syndrome" where you grow hair uncontrollably all over your body.

When I first saw Robert Downey's character in this movie, I instantly thought about Chewbacca, he is THAT hairy. And yes, there is an extended, painful to watch shaving scene. He is just flowing with hair. I looked on wikipedia, and apparently there are severe cases where people look like that. So there you go. I normally love Robert Downey Jr, but man did he ever send me over the edge with this movie. He talks in this pretentious soft voiced whisper the whole movie, which might be attributed to his dying lungs, but was still nevertheless incredibly annoying. He's also not a very good person over all in this movie, though his characters' main reason of being is to awaken the artist within Arbus.

This movie is very arty, much more so than any movie I have seen in a while. There is also a lot of weird to it, a lot of in-your-face nudity and circus freaks. It wasn't overly artistic to detract from the movie, and really, that added to it and made it more like the fantasy biopic I was expecting.

Spoilers!!

Diane Arbus and the hairy man start hanging out a lot, and eventually Arbus' husband gets angry and suspicious, and it comes to a head at their anniversary party. Arbus tells her husband that she is going to end this once and for all, and then goes upstairs and shaves the hairy man in the scene I mentioned before. This scene was over the top, as with every piece of skin she uncovers, she looks at it in wonder, as if she's never seen a leg before. Finally, he's shaven and then they go sleep together. That lost me. What an adultress, it was so terrible. You can argue with me all you want that she needed to become the artist she was meant to be, but she told her husband she was ending her relationship with this guy, and then she goes and does that. I'm not against women breaking out of being housewives, I rooted for Julianne Moore's character in The Hours, and the mother in Lovely Bones, but my moral side was really against Diane Arbus' decision at the end of this movie to hook up with Robert Downey Jr like that while she was still married and had just lied to her husband like that.

End of Spoilers!!

Anyways, Fur was an alright movie. Sometimes the straight up weirdness took away from the movie, but most of the time, it was fun and fantastical. Still, Robert Downey Jr's character was the king of overly pretentious, arrogant sleazeballs that I've seen this year, and I really didn't like how he was portrayed as a good kinda guy in this movie.