Featured Movies
Partners
Factory GirlFinally, in 2007, we get to see Sienna Miller not in a magazine or on the arm of some pasty-faced pretty boy. And she's genuinely good. Read anything about this film and there'll always be mention of the fact that a woman famous for playing dress-up shouldn't find it much of a stretch to portray her 1960s druggy US equivalent. However flawed, Miller's performance is a lot more than that.
We meet Edie (Miller) in rehab in 1970. She has long brown hair and the kind of oatmeal complexion you only get from daily facial pumicing and never opening the curtains. She's talking to a counsellor. This device is used to give the narrative some kind of shape as we return to her serenely relating the next chunk of her chaotic story to the unseen healthcare professional.
Warhol and Sedgwick only really hung out in New York and Paris for a year in 1965. But that's still a lot of soulless party action and montage-heavy exposition to squeeze into the 91 minutes of George Hickenlooper's brisk film. The story begins at college when the fresh-faced frat girl (kohl eyeliner = later moral degeneration) poses for a cutesy picture, taken by her pal. This is a handy visual signifier (if we were watching an afternoon TV movie about the 'Fight For Baby Jay' or some-such) which can be picked up and used later in the film to illustrate how Edie has changed. Hit us over the head with a photo why don't you.
So, Edie is a relatively green alumna from Santa Barbara who, on arrival in Manhattan, instantly becomes fabulous. There's no explanation as to how she got fabulous. There's just a moment at her first ever party in New York City where someone says to Andy Warhol (Pearce), "That's her," as she throws her head back and laughs. Andy is immediately entranced.
It's in the later stages of the film where Miller's performance suddenly shifts up a gear and you really start to feel for Edie. Up until then, it's Guy Pearce's film. He does a fantastic imitation of the Warhol we've all seen in film clips. His internal mantra could be Peter Cook in Bedazzled drawling, "You fill me with inertia."
"I just think people are so interesting," he tells one interviewer while appearing to nod off over a tax return. But Pearce gives him vulnerability and humour. And he's brilliantly cruel in his final scene with Edie, where the rejected muse confronts a newly Nico-ed up Warhol in a restaurant and incoherently blames him for her downfall.
Hayden Christensen is perfectly adequate as Not Bob Dylan, the rock star who apparently wins Edie's heart and forces her to look again at her frivolous ways. In an unbelievably simplified scene, after the rocker has flounced out of The Factory following a frosty screen test, he asks Edie to choose - her cuckoo chums or him. Warhol is supposed to be the devil and the rock star her rather deeper blue sea. But Pearce's performance makes Warhol look like the fun option. As for the rest of the supporting cast, they're just saying lines, actors in search of some direction judging by their rather disconnected performances. Mena Suvari is completely under-used.
As a launch pad for Miller's serious acting career, this is a good start. In moments of repose and playfulness she's far more impressive and affecting than when required to smear Rimmel all over her chops and wail. But as a well-conceived telling of a tragic life story, it's all over the place, flicking from trite afternoon teleplay to experimental art short and back. The sex scene between her and Christensen is pure Barbara Taylor Bradford with a Vaseline lens and gently tangled limbs lit by a log fire.
You can get away with a lot by saying it's a shallow film about shallow people. But the direction here lets down a sound script and some often brilliant acting.
|
