Fur: An Imaginary Portrait Of Diane Arbus

After a brief prologue at a nudist camp, the opening finds Arbus an obedient yet emotionally fragile housewife and mother from a privileged background; she shows some discomfort as second fiddle to her husband, a commercial photographer played by Ty Burrell. Eager to branch out, with her husband's full support, Arbus initially pokes around the city in an effort to find her artistic voice, but discovers her true inspiration much closer to home. Intrigued by the upstairs neighbor, a mystery recluse who obscures his face in a burlap mask, Arbus finds a gentle, intellectually simpatico man who happens to be covered head-to-toe in fur, due to a rare genetic condition. Played in a soulful turn by Robert Downey Jr., who expresses himself mainly through his eyes and his deep-timbred voice, he introduces Arbus to the malformed subjects that would give her work notoriety.

Arbus' point of view on her subjects has been a source of eternal controversy, with some charging that her photographs are clinical and exploitative, little more than artfully composed grotesquerie. Fur offers a retort to that criticism by imagining her connection—first curious, then romantic—to Downey and to the outcasts whose beauty only she can appreciate. Shainberg nicely draws Arbus and the audience deeper and deeper into the unknown and exotic, but he too is guilty of a certain amount of clinical detachment. Fur is that rare movie that's too understated, so quiet and deliberate that it effectively buries consuming passions.

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