Maybe they just got hung up on the repeated mentions of the word fur in the opening chapter of Bosworth's biography. Whatever the case, they, like their subject, wander into dangerous territory, though without the same inspired results. In 1957, Arbus stopped working with her husband and began wandering New York after dark taking photographs. It's instructive that the film doesn't mention that she also studied with the photographer Lisette Model, whose interest in everyday people, with their odd shapes and suffering faces, was an obvious influence. The idea that art can also arise from example and instruction just wouldn't jibe with the film's vision of an otherworldly kingdom in which hard work, ego and depression of the sort that probably claimed Arbus' life have no place.
And, so, in Fur, the Park Avenue princess leaves the bright world and climbs up, up, up to Lionel's enchanted garret filled with objets d'exotica and mounds of fur as neatly coiled as sleeping cats. Through her furry friend, she meets an armless woman, a dominatrix and many dwarves. She lets down her hair, goes sleeveless and abandons her husband and children to squalor. Kidman bears no physical resemblance to Arbus, who was small and dark and seemed very much tethered to the earth, perhaps because that is where she found the grist for her genius.
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