thePeanutBloggery

Sienna Miller may not make the best decisions when it comes men (see Jude Law), but she sure knows how to pick a role. As Warhol muse/superstar Edie Sedgwick in Factory Girl, Miller offers up a triumphant display of talent. It’s too bad she’s stuck in a film with so many problems.

With Guy Pearce as the only other actor truly exercising his acting chops as the enigmatic Mr. Warhol, Miller shares the screen with a less-than-spectacular array of what would otherwise read as a talented roster of individuals. Hayden Christensen, great in Shattered Glass, points the role of “musician” away from anything resembling originality to a light mockery of Bob Dylan, the artist on whom the role is based. The otherwise fantastic Illeana Douglas is either misused, underused, or just plain unnecessary–she finds, perhaps, a whole two minutes of screen time. And, for a comedic actor, Jimmy Fallon is decidedly dull in his turn as “flamboyant” New York socialite Chuck Wein. It’s enough to make you wonder who’s to blame: the director, the writer, or the actors?

Sedgwick’s life with Andy Warhol was more than fascinating enough to be the subject of a film, and it’s the on-screen exchanges between Miller and Pearce that make Factory Girl the marginal success it is. Their knowing glances and short verbal exchanges become a secret language no one else, not even the audience, can fully understand; it’s this unknown dialect that is their supposed cosmic connection. Unfortunately for Sedgwick, that’s all they seem to share. So introspective and stoic is Mr. Warhol that his steely exterior never gives way to any kind of genuine feeling for his muse. By all accounts, he may have taken great artistic pleasure in her decline, and it’s Sedgwick’s downward spiral into an abyss of excess and depravity that is captured in the uniquely entertaining manner one might expect from a film that reads like a diary turned tabloid. Ironically, Miller, like the film, shines most as Sedgwick hits rock bottom.