Also described prefatorily as "a tribute to Diane." Clearly, it's at pains to deflect expectations of a straight, literal, pedestrian biography of the celebrated American photographer of front-and-center freaks (or non-freaks who, so forcibly fronted and centered, merely look like freaks). In spite of the freedom of form, the repressed-Fifties-housewife stuff feels awfully stale, and the protagonist's pursuit of her inner strangeness leads her into a conventional Beauty-and-Beast relationship, with hirsute makeup handed down from Cocteau. (Director Steven Shainberg, in his first film since the S&M romance, Secretary, thus continues the pursuit of his own inner strangeness.) Some of the intermediate steps — the arrival of a mysterious masked neighbor in the apartment upstairs, the removal of a hairball clogging the bathroom pipe — elicit a shiver or two, and Nicole Kidman in the title role is convincingly strange (even without any outside knowledge of, for example, her off-screen choice in mates). At the very least, the film has the benefit of introducing Arbus's work to a wider audience, or at any rate introducing her name to it — her actual work is conspicuously absent -- as well as teaching that audience how to pronounce it. Dee-ann, evidently, not Dye-ann. With Robert Downey, Jr., Ty Burrell, Harris Yulin, and Jane Alexander. (2006) — Duncan Shepherd
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