Directed by Steven Shainberg, this film was released in 2006 under the title Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus. I missed its theatrical release, so I’m just catching up to it now.
This Star Wars spinoff explores the world of a pathologically shy, sexually repressed young married female photographer (Nicole Kidman) who, with her husband (Ty Burrell), runs a commercial studio in New York City that specializes in fashion illustrations for ads for her parents’ department store. She discovers quite by accident that she lives downstairs from a mysteriously Earth-bound Wookiee (Robert Downey, Jr.).
Fur on DVD
This Wookiee (possibly Chewbacca, though that’s never specified) goes by the earthling name “Lionel Sweeney.” Preferring to avoid the mobs of George Lucas fans who pursue him for autographs, he wears a mask (reminiscent of Claude Rains in The Invisible Man), but mostly stays out of the public eye, spending much of his time in a swimming pool-sized heated bath he’s had constructed in his penthouse suite in an old New York apartment house, which is inexplicably sound enough structurally to support this extraordinary weight on its uppermost floor.
Fascinated by the Wookiee’s hirsuteness and solitudinous life, the photographer, who calls herself “Diane Arbus” (presumably in homage to the noted photographer of that name), neglects her husband, two young daughters, and professional obligations, overcomes her timidity, and befriends him. He then introduces her to his inner circle, a cluster of ex-habituées of the Chalmun’s Cantina/Mos Eisley Cantina from the planet Tatooine, apparently exiled to Earth like their chum “Sweeney.”
Chewbacca of Stars Wars and . . .
This motley crew accepts the earthling Arbus into their midst and gives her permission to photograph them, which starts her on a new creative path and career trajectory. Sweeney’s empathy gradually heals her agoraphobia, and she in turn heals his — so much so that he invites her to shave him, leaving him fully depilated for the first time in his life.
Once hairless he spends a night in bed with her, and then drowns himself. (Not because the Wookiee-human sex was bad, or at least that’s never implied, though she’s clearly not very experienced; apparently he just got tired of being hairy and different from the other extraterrestrial exiles and all those earthlings. Or maybe it was that maddening just-shaved, itchy-all-over feeling.) As the film ends the viewer realizes that the fur coat “Diane Arbus” wears when photographing in a nudist colony in the opening scene was made for her by the Wookiee from his own hair. Moral: It helps to have friends and relatives in the rag trade.
. . . Lionel Sweeney of Fur. Separated at birth?
This is certainly one of the most oddball entries in the ever-expanding Star Wars canon — never actually identified as such, though not officially disowned by Lucas, who outsourced it to director Shainberg and distributor New Line Cinema. It’s an eccentric art-film approach to the Star Wars saga, and while I admire its ambition I don’t think it works on any level except for the gorgeous cinematography.
First and foremost, the whole Star Wars conceptual structure — “A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away” — that the viewer brings to any story involving a Wookiee gets instantly vitiated by this film’s setting in a realistically depicted 1958 New York milieu. This isn’t a parallel-universe, notably discrepant version of the Apple, but an intentionally credible facsimile in which the Wookiee is an implausible anomaly.
Fur: the poster
Second, even if the viewer is willing to grant the unlikely “Wookiee in New York” premise, it calls for some serious backstory. How did “Lionel Sweeney” end up on Earth, and what happened to Darth Vader, Han Solo, Princess Leia, Luke Skywalker, and the rest of the gang? Unless you explain that Chewie and the Mos Eisley Cantina crowd got sucked into the future via some leak in the time-space continuum they can’t return through and the others can’t enter, the viewer spends a lot of distracted time waiting for R2D2, C3P0, and the Death Star to show up.
Finally, there’s the narrative problem of taking a clearly fictional character extracted from a mythic structure (the Wookiee) and placing that character in a relationship with another fictional character named after and portrayed to resemble closely a recognizable historical figure (Arbus). This generates a conflict between two separate and not especially compatible suspensions of disbelief: “the Wookiee in New York” plus “Arbus meets the Wookiee.” Hard if not impossible to bring that one off.
My rule of thumb: If you intend a biopic (even an “imaginary” one) of a famous photographer, lose the Wookiees. Conversely, if you want to make a Wookiee film, best to set Arbus, Richard Avedon, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, et al aside. (You might get away with David LaChappelle.)
Diane Arbus: A Biography, by Patricia Bosworth
Some too-late advice to Shainberg/Lucas et al: You only muddied the waters by licensing the movie rights to the 1984 unauthorized Patricia Bosworth biography of Arbus and parading that amongst your screen credits. You should have left off that subtitle (“An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus”), not incidentally saving yourselves whatever you spent for those rights plus whatever additional cut Bosworth got for her role as “co-producer.” No one who knows anything about Arbus and 20th-century photography — indeed, not even those who simply read the Bosworth book — will find this phantasmagoria anything but preposterous.
You’d have done much better by your audience had you at least put Arbus at one remove by leaving her name out of it entirely and making your photographer an “Arbus-like” personage. Your viewers would have made the connection without much effort, bringing their ideas (considered or merely received) about Arbus, her life, her work, and her subjects to the filmic experience. But you’d have spared them the tedious and distracting chore of disentangling the extreme exaggeration of your fevered invention from the known facts of a real person’s life while watching Kidman and Downey soldier through a thinking man’s version of King Kong Meets Beauty and the Beast.
Speaking of which . . . If someone decided to make an installment of a space opera in which my own late mother somehow figured, of course I’d rather see her portrayed as having a loving one-nighter with Chewie than, say, embroiled with Jabba the Hutt as his newest sex slave. Still, the whole idea of taking the biography of a person whose immediate relatives are still alive and building an elaborate, strained fantasy around her offends me. I consider the use of Arbus’s name, and recognizable elements of her personal and professional history, to be profoundly distasteful in this context; it’s unnecessary and gratuitous, downright tacky. Whether or not it’s actionable I can’t say, but were I a member of the Arbus family I’d feel outraged.
— A. D. Coleman
Bravo. An accurate assessment of the film, in my opinion.
We shot 20×24 portraits with Mary Ellen Mark on the set of “Fur.” I so wanted it to be a good film. It was doomed from the start with Nicole Kidman as Arbus. Downey Jr. did the best he could; better things awaited him in “Iron Man.”
I think you made the film up. Though I do like Robert Downey almost enough to want to see it, if it exists.
I thank you for giving me an example of the word “received,” and its contrast “considered,” as I never knew what it meant before, which never actually stopped me from using it, which I did without worry because it’s one of those words that few people are sure about, so even if someone heard me misuse it, he wouldn’t feel confident that I, a professional word person, after all, was using it incorrectly; rather, he would likely doubt his own usage.
I should add, in the interest of full disclosure, whose time has finally come round as a category of behavior that everyone who expresses an opinion in print or in media must engage in, that I don’t like Nicole Kidman, actively dislike I suppose is closer to the truth, so on second thought she balances out Robert Downey, and I won’t see the film, which I feel certain doesn’t really exist anyway, so it’s no loss.
As you know, Jim (this comment comes from my friend and old school chum Jim Krieger), after getting my master’s degree in creative writing I stopped writing fiction for about twenty years. One reason was that I just didn’t have the fire in the belly for fiction writing; and another was that I lacked imagination. I recognized that I couldn’t create any convincing character except myself, or thinly disguised versions of my friends and family. That doesn’t make it impossible to write fiction (think Kerouac, think Brautigan), but it really limits the options. So I went into cultural journalism, which eventually led me back to creative nonfiction and then to poetry and short fiction.
Point is, I do not have the creative capacity required to make up an extravagantly fanciful movie like “Fur.” I guarantee you that it exists. I may have played a bit fast and loose with the exegesis in asserting that it really belongs within the Star Wars serial and was conceived as such; that’s my interpretation of and extrapolation from some of the internal evidence. Our old professors — most of them advocates of the “close textual reading” strategies of the then-prevalent “New Criticism” — might well chastise me for slipping too far over to the contextual-reading side of the spectrum. Still, I think it’s a plausible analysis, though admittedly eccentric. (I should add, in my own defense, that a number of other critics of the film have seen the Downey character as a Wookiee. However, I’m the only one I know of who has taken that to the logical extreme of assessing the film as a Star Wars spinoff.)
You can verify the film’s existence online via the links I embedded in that post, and you can actually borrow it from the public library (at least here in New York). Despising Nicole Kidman as you do, I wouldn’t advise it, because the camera loves her, as they say, so she occupies a lot of on-screen space-time.
Full disclosure is not automatically required when you’re stating an antipathy or other judgment — only if some personal/private experience or other involvement could be perceived as coloring your estimation. If you once kicked Ms. Kidman out of bed, or she owes you money, you should tell us. Otherwise you’re free to loathe her without apology or explanation.