All fur coat and knickers

In Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's novel about humiliation and marble-white flesh, Venus in Furs, a seductress named Wanda taunts the man who would be her slave, "And so now fur arouses your bizarre fantasies?" Impatient for the inevitable answer (yes, and how), Wanda begins "coquettishly draping herself in her splendid fur, so that the dark, shiny sables flashed delightfully around her breasts, her arms." From such turgid lust and swollen prose a perversion is born, as well as a slow-burn Velvet Underground song.

The new film Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus is a fantasy of a different order. Its marble-white Venus is Nicole Kidman, who here wears a conceit rather than a sable. The film's core idea is that Arbus, who trained her photographic gaze on nudists, twins, grimacing children and the retarded, liberated her muse by coaxing out her inner freak. The film conjures a conduit to her liberation in the furry form of Lionel, a neighbor played by Robert Downey Jr. The actor's involvement is something you need to take on faith, since he spends most of the film covered in fur, a costume that suggests the bewitched prince in Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast and makes Downey look like an immaculately groomed Shih Tzu.

Fur is a folly, though not a dishonorable one. It was directed by Steven Shainberg, whose last feature, Secretary, was a tender love story about a shy masochist and the boss who spanks his way into her heart. The film was funny and modest, and it treated the putative perversions of its characters with the kind of good, gracious humor that insists on respect for everyone involved. Fur is a more ambitious work, in part because of Kidman, whose talent cannot obscure that she has been grievously miscast and left to indulge her mannered coyness.

The fetish of casting high-wattage movie stars, no matter how badly they fit the role, is one of the maladies of contemporary independent and quasi-independent filmmaking.

In 1971, at age 48, Arbus swallowed a large number of barbiturates and then, perhaps to make sure that she had finished the job, slit her wrists. Born Diane Nemerov into a wealthy New York family (her brother was the poet Howard Nemerov), she met Allan Arbus, played by Ty Burrell, when she was 14 and married him as soon as she was legal. He introduced her to photography and she served as his assistant. Together they worked for fashion magazines and on advertising campaigns, including those for her family's department store, Russeks, which was known for its furs. According to Arbus' biographer, Patricia Bosworth, Diane's father understood how to drape women in ermine. "Fur," he said, "creates a protective image."

One woman's protective image is another woman's sexual fetish is another woman's fictional gamble. In Fur, Shainberg's screenwriter, Erin Cressida Wilson, who also wrote Secretary, twists the classic Freudian concept of sexual fetishism, having apparently decided that the best way to explain Arbus's singular perspective on the world is to transform her into a fetishist. Thus, in this formulation, Lionel, her fuzzy neighbor, becomes a kind of walking, talking fetish, a means — to freedom, creativity, imagination and what Bosworth calls the dark world — that will usher her into a new realm. This sounds more promising than what materializes on screen largely because Shainberg and Wilson have turned Arbus' life into a neurotic fairy tale.