There’s no safer formula than the biopic. It worked for Ray, Walk the Line, and Capote—and it seemed as though it could work for Fur, too, especially since most audiences know Diane Arbus only through her haunting photographs. But director Steven Shainberg was sick of Behind the Music clichés.

“No matter how good Will Smith may be playing Ali, or Ed Harris playing Pollock, that straight-ahead, greatest-hits approach doesn’t work for me,” says Shainberg, who broke through with the kinky indie Secretary. “You already know everything that is going to happen.”

So Shainberg decided to gamble. “This is not a biopic at all,” he says. “It’s an imaginary portrait that tries to capture the otherworldly, hallucinogenic, mythological quality of her photographs.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Here is an amazing fairy story from modern Manhattan, a version of beauty and the beast (but which is which?). Diane Arbus is married and the mother of two. She helps her husband’s photography business and the family fur company. And she is a nervous wreck—because she isn’t expressing herself. Then a stranger moves into the upstairs apartment—call him Lionel, and step carefully. He is rare and alarming, but he is a tender soul who will introduce Diane to the lives of the other-than-ordinary. He will give us the Arbus we know. This is an astonishingly bold fable by Steven Shainberg (SECRETARY) that relies to a great extent on the courage, the beauty and the sheer adventurousness of its two central players: Robert Downey Jr. as Lionel and Nicole Kidman going for broke again and suggesting that it’s about time someone wrote a book about her. –DT

Telluride ’06: Fur

Discussion after late-night movies happens on the gondola ride from the Chuck Jones Theater in the mountains to the town of Telluride, in the valley between them. It’s pitch black inside the car; outside are only stars and the golden lights below; inside are eight (usually random) cinephiles thrown together in a dark moving box for 15 minutes.

Tonight the discussion was about Fur, the Diane Arbus biopic starring Nicole Kidman in another daring career choice. As one of the voices in the darkness said on the gondola ride, Kidman has “guts.” This is not your conventional biopic (thank Jesus). Its world premiere ended a short while ago, and it redeemed the genre for me. It’s not a great film, but it is a good one, and certainly better than the rash of music biopics that stumbled into our field of vision in the past couple years. Fur is by the director of Secretary, Steven Shainberg, who was in the audience. Both his films exist beyond weirdness.

Read the rest of this entry »