ALLAN HUNTER at the Movies

Edie Sedgwick was the superstar of Andy Warhol’s New York Factory in the 1960s. A poor little rich girl, she soared to fame on the wings of Warhol’s obsession with her, and crashed and burned when his obsession moved else where.

She may have been the first victim of society’s shallow fascination with celebrity culture. Her life might make a great movie, but ‘Factory Girl’ takes a tedious, documentary-style approach to her story, and feels like a missed opportunity.

Sienna Miller is no stranger to the position of fickle mistress of tabloid fame herself, but proves that she is also a talented actress with her committed work as Edie.

It is her most demanding role and her best performance. She convincingly charts Edie’s descent from starry-eyed ambition to panda-eyed despair.

Gaunt Australian actor Guy Pearce is also highly convincing as Andy Warhol, presenting him as something of a blank canvas that the world chose to interpret in whatever way they wished.

Bitchy and manipulative, he is also the villain of the piece, happy to make Edie the Eliza Dolittle to his Henry Higgins until her fame threatened to eclipse his.

‘Star Wars’ actor Hayden Christensen is less comfortably cast as Billy Quin, a surly 1960s folk singer based on Bob Dylan but altered to avoid any nasty lawsuits. His relationship with Edie is one of the more conventional and least convincing aspects of the story.

The problem with ‘Factory Girl’ is that none of the characters are especially sympathetic. More than thirty years after Sedgwick’s tragic death from a drugs overdose, the film fails to convince us why she really mattered or why we should remember her as anything other than a minor footnote in the lives of some remarkable artistic figures.

Selected nationwide release

Director: George Hickenlooper
Stars: Sienna Miller, Guy Pearce, Hayden Christensen, Jimmy Fallon, Mena Suvari, Illeana Douglas.
Screenwriter: Aaron Richard Golub, Captain Mauzner
Certificate: 15
Running time: 87 mins
Country: USA
Year: 2006

© Allan Hunter, 2007