(2006) Secrets ("I must be brave") about swimming out farther, beyond blue into black and white. Director Steven Shainberg and screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson's biographical invention of a few months in the artist's life, inspired by Patricia Bosworth's book, Diane Arbus: A Biography, incorporates elements of Alice in Wonderland with Beauty and the Beast.

In 1958, taking her Rolleiflex flash camera, when Diane Arbus (Nicole Kidman) at age 35 enters Camp Venus for nudists to take photographs, she's told (two rules: no erections and no staring) that she must disrobe first. The story then backs up three months to New York City, introducing us to her wealthy Jewish parents, David and Gertrude Nemerov, owners of Russeks fur garments, whose son-in-law Allan Arbus (Ty Burrell) photographs in his studio their fur fashions on models for ads in The New York Times.

His wife and mother of two daughters Diane acts as his assistant, performing light readings and ironing clothes; she has never used the camera he bought for her ten years earlier until she's attracted to the new upstairs neighbor, a man in a mask, who watches her unbutton her dress on the porch on a stifling night.

Cleaning out gobs of hair from the plumbing, Diane discovers a key as well. "I fixed my drain for you," Lionel Sweeney (Robert Downey Jr) informs her and invites her in when she makes a secretive trip in the middle of the night to his apartment.

"Don't look at me," says the man with hypertrychosis, who creates wigs for his clients from his excess of hair, before asking her to disrobe (she declines at first) and indecent questions. Diane tells him of her childhood fascination with a boy having a purple birthmark over his face.

Lionel introduces her to her first corpse and others outside the mainstream of humanity: Althea the armless woman who uses her foot for a hand, midgets and dwarfs, transvestites and other social deviants, a giant and a Siamese twin. "Freaks," complains Allan, who grows a beard, jealous of his wife's falling in love with Lionel, who is dying of a lung ailment.

Diane Arbus, known for her black-and-white photographs of "deviant and marginal people," lived from 1923 until she committed suicide in 1971.

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Copyright © 2010 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
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