A Boring, Unromantic (But Pretty) Valentine Post

I'll come right out and say it, I didn't like Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus much at all. It's not a biopic of the photographer that made her name taking portraits of all manners of freaks and social outcasts, and even says so right in the title. And similar to a portrait, also referenced in the title, it gives you a picture of the subject, but not a full one, so you never get anything more than just a general feeling about the main character. Like most traditional portraits, it is also inherently pretty and looks amazing, but lacks greater depth.

A bored housewife gets sick of helping her photographer husband, and goes out seeking subjects for her own photography. She meets the hairy freak living upstairs, who is Robert Downey, Jr. underneath tons of makeup, and the two forges a connection. He shows her an entire alternative world of freaks, and she is fascinated; her inner artist awakens.

Yet for a film that ostensibly wants to portray these freaks as human, it hardly gets over letting the audience leer at their freakishness. Apart from Downey, few of them get any personalities at all. But I guess it kind of makes up for Nicole Kidman having no real personality throughout the movie - if she's barely human, then perhaps the freaks are more human than we thought.

This movie is pretty - the makeup effects and production design all help create a wonderfully dreamlike world that blends seamlessly with reality. But this doesn't help the glacial pace of everything, and at the end of it all, you realize that the movie doesn't really go anywhere and you don't give a damn about anything. It's wannabe-art that doesn't have much to say and is overwhelmingly unnecessary and purely masturbatory.