A Convincing Sienna Miller Saves Film About Andy Warhol Protege Edie Sedgwick

By Terry Lawson, Detroit Free Press

Feb. 16–L

est you think that sad, self-exploited Anna Nicole Smith symbolizes the darker outcomes of celebrity culture, along comes “Factory Girl” to remind today’s generation that it’s all been done before — but without the Internet and tabloids to keep the buzz burning.

“Factory Girl,” directed by George Hickenlooper, is a biography of sorts of poor little rich girl Edie Sedgwick, a relic of a time when choosing facile emptiness over authenticity was considered an artistic statement.

So went the ’60s dogma of the Factory, the New York warehouse-fiefdom where self-styled enigma Andy Warhol churned out his silk-screen art, his often provocative and intentionally taxing movies and a glittery parade of sycophants eager to bask in his low-wattage irony.

Sedgwick, a gamine, intelligent beauty who spoke like Katharine Hepburn and carried herself like Audrey Hepburn, was one of the few products of the Factory to achieve fame, primarily by dying young and leaving a beautiful, if somewhat picked over, corpse.

“Factory Girl” would like us to view this as a preventable tragedy, but like the demise of the far less self-aware Anna Nicole Smith, Sedgwick’s death seems as predestined as a Hollywood melodrama.

Although there seems precious little point in devoting further attention to the tawdry twists of the Smith saga or the Lindsay Lohan rehab watch, there are a couple of reasons to watch “Factory Girl.” They are the truly convincing portrayal of the alluring Edie by Sienna Miller, who makes this movie watchable despite its obviousness, and the uncanny impersonation of Warhol by Guy Pearce. He easily outdoes the Warhol portrayals previously committed to celluloid by David Bowie (“Basquiat”), Crispin Glover (“The Doors”), Jared Harris (“I Shot Andy Warhol”), Sean Gregory Sullivan (“54″) and even Hank Azaria (“The Simpsons.”)

Those films all viewed Warhol to some degree as an object of mystery or ridicule, but Pearce gets beneath the wigs, shades and guises to the insecure mama’s boy and egomaniac who loved nothing more than inspiring chaos, self-doubt, admiration, worship and loathing in everyone in his orbit.

“Factory Girl” sends Sedgwick directly from an old-money, screwed-up East Coast family, art school enthusiasms and the mental institution that served as finishing school for her clan to mid-’60s Manhattan. There, her modish looks and breathy insouciance almost immediately lead her to Andy, who instantly adopts her as a girlfriend, muse and party favor.

She brings sex appeal and possible financial prosperity to his Factory workplace-party room, which is populated by somewhat less glamorous trust-fund hippies like Brigid Polk (Tara Summers), Ondine (Armin Amiri), Gerard Malanga (Jack Huston) and Ingrid Superstar (Mary Elizabeth Winstead). She’s the film’s fictional version of Viva, the first to claim the Superstar designation.

Sedgwick endears herself to Andy and his crowd by calming a horse that is starring in one of Warhol’s avant-garde movies and then proceeds to make everyone else either fall in love with her or become jealous of her ascension to the right hand of Andy’s throne.

Standing outside all this is a mumbling, impassioned folksinger named Billy Quinn (Hayden Christensen), who is about to take the world by storm. He sees the Factory crowd for the bloodsucking phonies they are and apparently is supposed to represent redemption and a way out that Edie is too fragile, speed-addicted and Warhol-manipulated to navigate.

Clearly, Quinn is supposed to be Bob Dylan. He was rumored to have been infatuated with Sedgwick briefly and to have written “Just Like a Woman” about her, though there is no physical evidence that is true. (She was more likely a conquest of Dylan’s road manager and foil Bobby Neurwith, portrayed here by Shawn Hatosy.)

It is rumored that Dylan threatened legal action against the film’s producers unless he was allowed to vet the project, and he’s said to have done that. Although “Factory Girl” was shown at film festivals in a longer version than the one in release now, it seems likely it was cut for reasons involving lack of momentum instead of slights toward Dylan — although one hopes Dylan took at least some umbrage at Christensen’s impersonation; it’s not nearly as convincing as Pearce’s channeling of Warhol.

Miller is so captivating, compelling and absurdly sexy that she is easy enough to fall for, even if she seems a lot more scattered and easily led than the woman-child recalled in George Plimpton’s oral biography or the documentary “Ciao! Manhattan”.

She is, in fact, a lot more like the myth of Marilyn than perhaps even Marilyn was and a far cry from someone like Anna Nicole Smith, who may have been unable to see the state she was in. Miller’s Edie sees it, knows it and makes us care despite everything.

Contact TERRY LAWSON at 313-223-4524 or tlawson@freepress.com

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Copyright (c) 2007, Detroit Free Press

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