Factory Girl
Directed by George Hickenlooper
Forget all that blabber about whether or not there’s real sex in Factory Girl. If Sienna Miller and Hayden Christensen really go all the way—their murky love scene makes that seem unlikely—it would be the most elegant thing about this misguided biopic. For all the appreciable intentions of director George Hickenlooper, you can get a better feel for the sad demise of Andy Warhol muse Edie Sedgwick from the clips available on YouTube.
Sedgwick was an heiress who spent all her money on partying, toyed with superstardom as the central personality of Warhol’s esoteric cinematic experiments and fell prey to a drug overdose in her late twenties. You might call her a predecessor of Paris Hilton, with a destructive detour into the world of avant garde.
Miller plays Sedgwick with every ounce of her creative agility, resulting in the best performance of her short career. But the elation of watching Miller morph into a devastatingly pitiable persona is counteracted by a script that makes you loathe Sedgwick and the ’60s counterculture that engulfs her fragile existence. On the one hand, it’s refreshing for a movie to avoid the trappings of a hagiography. But Factory Girl presents every character in the cruelest light possible.
Guy Pearce plays Warhol as a gross caricature. The artist draws Sedgwick into the unfettered chaos of his Factory, an addictive circle of experimental art masquerading as a never-ending party—or is it the other way around? Warhol’s foil arrives in the form of a popular folk singer (Christensen), with whom Sedgwick becomes blindly smitten, leading to an odd sort of love triangle that careens toward inevitable disaster. Since Warhol is gay, it’s not Sedgwick’s affair with the singer that ticks him off, but rather her lapse in allegiance to his specific brand of artiness.
The singer, of course, is one Bob Dylan, and Christensen portrays the man with pitch-perfect confidence. The movie can’t identify the character, however, since Factory Girl was wounded in early December 2006, when Dylan’s lawyers raised hell about the alleged connections the filmmakers drew between the couple’s affair and Sedgwick’s death. Such an implication comes across in faint undertones, probably resulting from the last-minute reedits that delayed the film’s release and trumped the Weinstein Company’s hopes of getting Factory Girl into this year’s Academy Awards marathon. It doesn’t deserve such accolades, but the incorporation of Dylan into the storyline is one of the most successful devices. His perspective gives Sedgwick her only moments of lucidity, in addition to her best lines. (“You’re an overpaid prophet, and I’m a poor little rich girl” is my personal favorite.)
Miller provides Factory Girl its velocity, with all the fiery sex appeal that apparently gave Sedgwick her initial career boost. But the final scenes amass in an awkward finale, and the last word goes to Warhol, of all people. Pearce certainly looks the part, although he fails to chew on scenery with the gooey joy that Crispin Glover brought to the role in Oliver Stone’s The Doors. Pearce’s take on Warhol has a more confounding purpose than all those soup cans combined.
