Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus: Critic Reviews

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.

Fur is a folly, though not a dishonorable one.

An interestingly designed but inescapably pointless film.

If you are seeking illumination about Arbus' artistry or her psyche, it's not here.

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.

The movie officially becomes the one thing Arbus's photography refused to be: normal.

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.

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.

Fur starts stylishly, and confidently, but the film dwindles down to a chamber piece in a claustrophobic chamber.

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.

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.

A revelatory, challenging and deeply affecting portrait, anchored by what may be Kidman's most profoundly moving performance to date.

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.

Much of the film is absurdist nonsense, and its symbolism is of the plank-to-the-head variety.

This fractured beauty-and-the-beast fairytale comes off disturbingly simple-minded.

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.

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.

Fur may not be entirely convincing, but it's made with a conviction that deserves respect.

Impressively crafted and acted but far too narrowly and benignly conceived to satisfy even on its own terms.

Like the artists who stock the Whitney Biennial with their plastic puddles of vomit, Fur works feverishly to dress up cliches.

[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.

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.

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.