In a way, Sienna Miller was the perfect choice to play Edie Sedgwick in the biopic ""Factory Girl.""
Sedgwick, like Miller today, was famous for little more than being gorgeous, rich and hanging around with celebrities who actually made their name working in some sort of artistic medium. Unfortunately, Miller, like Sedgwick, isn't much of an actress, and while Sedgwick's non-actress bubbly aloofness made avant-garde flicks like Andy Warhol's ""Vinyl"" so interesting, Miller's bubbly attempts create a real character in a linear film amount to not much more than glamour-girl posturing.
Miller's problem is symptomatic of what is primarily wrong with ""Factory Girl""—the entire film amounts to little more than a glamorous snapshot imitation of Andy Warhol's legendary Factory scene. In the '60s, Warhol unleashed his commercial art onto an unsuspecting world and New York's hip, creative and drug-addicted converged on his Factory loft for a nonstop Dionysian party. For a few years at least, Sedgwick was one of Warhol's best friends, his muse and a leading actress in his films.
Considering Warhol's incalculable influence upon our way of thinking about art, media and celebrity, any film that details him and his notorious lifestyle is bound to be interesting, which ""Factory Girl"" certainly is. The film serves as an excellent primer on what it meant to be hip and avant-garde in New York during the '60s, but it fails almost completely at really making us care about the woman this film is ostensibly about.
In this film, Sedgwick is just a spoiled rich girl too strung out on heroin to realize she's being used by those around her. According to the film, the two main offenders are Warhol, who Guy Pearce nails in a fantastic performance, capturing Andy's awkward charm and oddball vocal nuances perfectly; and a character played by Hayden Christensen who is not actually called Bob Dylan for legal reasons but who obviously couldn't be anyone else. Christensen doesn't excel here but hardly hurts his credibility either—the main problem is he's just too pretty to play Dylan convincingly.
The film attempts to show us the way in which Warhol and Dylan, both separately and in their inability to get along with one another, were partly responsible for Edie's reckless behavior and death. They both pretended to care for her— Warhol as a mentor and Dylan as a lover—but in the end they were both more interested in her as an ""It"" girl, which naturally means after some time they have no interest in her at all. Both Warhol and Dylan were known for their casual cruelty when it came to others, but the film hardly succeeds in making us feel bad for Sedgwick, who spends daddy's money like there's no tomorrow, doesn't work and actively seeks out the fame and drugs that kill her.
But it is not Miller's fault this film doesn't succeed. Her overacting is distracting but not entirely out of place, considering amateurish overacting marked the entire Warhol scene this film is mostly about. It is the in-your-face direction and trite screenplay that really mar ""Factory Girl.""
The Dylan character gets laughable lines to spit in Sedgwick's face like (while tapping on her heart), ""It's empty in there, just like one of his [Warhol's] soup cans."" The directing is even more distracting, with George Hickenlooper employing useless split screens and making the camera all blurry when Edie's overdosing, which shows a clear lack of creativity.
But in all truthfulness, the film's main offense is in showing us something no one ever, ever wanted to see—a gratuitous sex scene involving Bob Dylan. When Bobbo and Edie first do it, you see the fire in the background, the sweaty intertwined legs and the deep kisses. At this point, you think you can handle it. But then the two work it quite graphically.
It's rumored that Christensen and Miller, dating at the time of filming, actually had sex in front of the camera, which Hickenlooper hasn't denied. We all love Dylan, but please, did we ever want to think of him naked? Or having sex? No. That is gross. So while ""Factory Girl"" fails overall, it should primarily be remembered for a very unwanted sex scene.
