The division of opinion in responses to FUR - AN IMAGINARY PORTRAIT OF DIANE ARBUS is a healthy one and it is reassuring to read so many fine views of the film's worth. Diane Arbus remains one of the more important artists of the 20th century, a woman who defied societal taboos and entered the world of the marginal people - fellow human beings whose genetic inheritances could be viewed as either curses or variations of normal. Without making judgments Arbus photographed little people and giants, people with less than four limbs, people with deformities both skeletal and flesh defined, people whose life styles influenced at times grotesque appearances: in the end the common denominator is 'people'. She was unafraid to observe and to capture nature's variations.

How this great artist transitioned from the ordinary life of the 'proper wife and mother' of the 1950s to the world of the bizarre has always been a story that begged to be told. In this film, loosely based on the biography by Patricia Bosworth as adapted by Erin Cressida Wilson, driven director Steven Shainberg strives to create a story that would explain the transition. It is only a story and to judge it as honest biography would be incorrect. It is fantasy and one that is a clever, if overdone, explanation for Arbus' choices she made in her private life and in her artistic life.

As Diane Arbus, Nicole Kidman once again inhabits the role of a very strange personality and does it so well that she manages to take us along the odd journey on which she embarks. Her nice but mundane husband Allan (Ty Burrell) allows her to explore the presence of a new tenant Lionel (Robert Downey Jr.),encouraging his frustrated wife to take up photography on her own rather than serving as his assistant for the fashion magazine images he grinds out. Lionel is covered with hair (hypertrichosis) and as a sideshow freak has many friends who have deformities. Arbus enters this world, loves the freedom of expression she has longed for, and in time falls in love with Lionel, leaving her family to enter completely the vision she has discovered (this is not a spoiler as the film opens with this information).

Yes, Shainberg can be criticized for excess and for pushing the boundaries of credibility, but for this viewer that approach enhances the concept of visualizing the epiphany in an artist's life when the world changes to a form the artist can then capture and share. The sets, photography, and the acting fit the idea - even the far too prolonged love scene/body shaving sequence and aftermath that can only be described as bizarre. The film is obviously a work of love and one that honors the life of Diane Arbus, even though we are not given much true information about the woman. Veteran actors Jane Alexander and Harry Yulin add to the dignity of the project, as does a fascinatingly simple musical score by Carter Burwell. This is a film for those who appreciate fantasy as a means of relating a history: for those who need factual biographical approach this film will not appeal. Grady Harp

Defying biopic clichés and overlapping reality and fantasy - so that the viewer eventually hardly understands what's real and what's not - "Fur" is definitely a provocative movie, not only another version of "The Beauty and the Beast". The odd subject is handled with impeccable effects and a stunning acting, the obvious question is asked by a HUGE metaphor - what's better between a man covered with fur and snobbish people wearing fur? Truly intriguing the film has some stasis moments that prevent it from being excellent, nevertheless it's about an interesting story, certainly worth viewing. Plus it gives a singular and also metaphorical finale showing Kidman removing her clothing along with her "social vestment".

This is a love story. That it happens to be based on an interpretation of Diane Arbus' life is supervenient. This could be any young woman from an artistic but conventional background living in Greenwich Village in 1958. Or it could be Alice in Wonderland. When Nicole Kidman, as Arbus, first enters Lionel Sweeney's (Robert Downey's) apartment upstairs, she can't find him in the colored shadows but when a teapot whistles she finds a note next to it. "Pour the boiling water into the tea cup. Let it steep. Drink it." It might as well be Alice's little bottle that is labeled "Drink me." Anyway, that visit introduces Kidman to a world quite different from the one she's used to. Downey is covered with more hair than Lawrence Talbot whom he, in fact, resembles. In some ways it works to his advantage. All we can see of him, his tresses aside, are his dark liquid eyes, and all we hear is his deep, sonorous, mysterious, monotonic voice. He tells her what to do, in detail. "Take off your slippers." "Close your eyes and don't turn around." "Disrobe." At that point I would already be out of there. It wouldn't be because he's Jo-Jo the Dog Faced Boy but because I don't like being ordered around -- except by particular women at a time and place of my own choosing.

Downey begins to take her around town to meet his friends. While traveling in public, Downey wears a hood something like the elephant man's. Yet it serves more to call attention to him than to deflect it, because the hood is clumsily made of white cloth and crudely stitched with horrifyingly over-sized black thread. The hood screams, "Look at ME." But Kidman is no stranger to the moral power of victimhood and she knows how to use it. When Downey first addresses her as "Dye-anne" she quickly corrects him, "Actually it's 'Dee-onne'." She's probably been correcting other people all her life and may have gotten to enjoy it, otherwise why not let the solecism glide a time or two, or soften the correction somehow, maybe something like, "My friends pronounce it 'Dee-onne'." Imagine if the man we know as Mario Cuomo abruptly began demanding that people call him "Mah-rio", as in Italy. He could be the equivalent of Leonard Bernstein who used to really chew people out for saying Bern-steen when he insisted on Bern-stine. Or was it the other way round? I forget.

Where was I before I was overcome by these sociological insights. Yes, "fur." That's right. Thank you.

It's an extremely and consciously artistic movie and it's atmosphere is stunning, as is Nicole Kidman. The problem is that it falls into an all-too-familiar trap. The victims (in this case the human anomalies) are good and the ordinary people are not so good. Kidman's husband, the holotypical normal, is distant, humorless, and rather dull. In actual life he couldn't have been quite that inexpressive since he at least grew a beard which, in 1958, was still an object of public comment. But when Kidman invites her new friends in for dinner, he can't stand them and walks out. Kidman's parents are presented as a pair of prunes. The anomalies, on the other hand, may be a bit shocking to look at or to watch. I mean, there's the otherwise limbless woman who does everything from eating to painting with one foot. But, heck, they're a lot of fun too. They have parties together, listen to jazz, drink, laugh, and smoke dope.

The climactic scene has Kidman shaving the ape man -- all over. He comes out looking remarkably like Robert Downey, Jr. After that they make love, and after that he takes a last swim out to see. And Diane -- that's Dee-onne -- Arbus wasn't far behind him.

The movie generates a good deal of pathos but it suffers from the stereotyping of its characters. It would have been nice to have just one mean dwarf. Or if the anomalies had just one other normal-looking friend. However, the introduction of even that small amount of ambiguity might have undercut the sympathy and the tears that the movie works so hard to jerk.