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>> Trite biopic Factory Girl evokes the turbulent life of Warhol cohort Edie Sedgwick

CIAO, EDIE! Sienna Miller

The deliriously flamboyant milieu of Andy Warhol’s Factory scene has always been a temptation to filmmakers, among them Warhol himself (or at least, Warhol via Paul Morrissey, who claims creative ownership over the Factory films). Most movies that feature Warhol as a character adjunct to some other person’s story—The Doors, I Shot Andy Warhol, Basquiat—and such is the case with Factory Girl, a biopic of legendary “superstar” Edie Sedgwick.

The beautiful Sedgwick was the scion of an extremely wealthy, extremely fucked-up oldmoney family. Leaving art school in the ’60s and moving to New York, she found her way into the Factory crowd and, for a while, was Warhol’s constant companion and presumed muse, until the drugs took their toll; she died of an overdose at age 28.

With such a glamorous, crazy life, it’s a shame that director George Hickenlooper (The Mayor of Sunset Strip) has taken such a trite, boringly obvious approach to his subject’s life. The clichés here are unforgiveable: the over-scripted voice-over, the important life moments ticked off one by one, the freeze-frame final shot. Brit actress Sienna Miller plays Sedgwick at times very well (especially at her most addled), but when she’s forced to do that awful narration, presented as Sedgwick talking to an offscreen therapist, it’s pretty brutal.

The movie portrays an affair between Sedgwick and an unnamed famous musician as being the final wedge in her relationship with Warhol (played by Guy Pearce). That “musician,” also referred to as a “folk singer,” is so obviously meant to be Bob Dylan that Hickenlooper barely disguises it. But why he chose the extremely goyish and blond Hayden Christensen for Dylan— ahem, for “musician”—is anyone’s guess; the miscasting is disastrous.

One thing the film does get right is the look: the production design is great and evokes ’60s New York beautifully, and of course it’s important to get the clothing right for a style icon like Sedgwick, which the film does. Hickenlooper switches between film stocks, often using grainy, colour-saturated (or black and white, in the case of the Warhol film re-creations) 16mm, which also adds to the film’s overall feel. But despite the fancy dressings, this is still a dull and depressingly standard biopic.

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