Andy Warhol Looked a Dream ...
Oh yeah, Sienna Miller is fine. She's cute and naive and looks nice in a miniskirt (it has been maliciously suggested that she is really just playing herself). But don't see this movie for her. In fact, if you must see this movie (because you are dragged along by a pre-teen relative or because you have a secret crush on Sienna Miller/Hayden Christensen or because you haven't been pre-warned), see it for Guy Pearce's malevolent Andy Warhol, channelling everyone from Truman Capote to David Bowie's Thin White Duke to Dracula.
You do have to question the thinking behind making a movie about a tortured but ultimately dizzy poor-little-rich-girl with Daddy issues. The clothes look great, as does Miller's hair. But there isn't much else there. She has a clingy friendship with Warhol ("muse" seems a little excessive as a word to describe their relationship as shown here) and a failed love interest in "The Pop Star" (Christensen, doing a passable job at not playing Dylan) and then gets more and more heavily into drugs. The film is bookended with an annoying and unnecessary voiceover and inexplicably leaves out the last years of her life (including her marriage, divorce and death) which are arguably the most interesting.
It all looks like a grubby 2007 version of what the 60s might have been like if you were part of the glamorami - or, as Warhol might say, a superstar. Everyone having a good time doing not-sure-what-exactly (shown by swapping jumpers in a restaurant or making out with a horse on film) and taking drugs and wearing opaque tights, miniskirts and fur coats as they stroll through Central Park. Nothin
g actually happens, but that's kind of the point, as Edie herself might say - the inaneness of it all is what the Factory was all about. But I don't buy it. It's dressed up but has no grit, no intrigue and no ambition. Which is probably more to do with Edie's personality than with the movie itself. If someone were to make a film of Paris Hilton's life in forty year's time (we can only hope her fame will be as short-lived as Edie's) would we really expect to see a realistic portrayal of life in the Noughties?
Having said all that, this film could have worked if Edie's story were used as a backdrop for a character study of Warhol or Quinn (read Dylan), or of the changing times of swinging New York in the Sixties. As it goes, they could have paid their scriptwriter more, and gone without some of the minks.
Oh yeah, and the sex scene? Almost as bad as 300. There is no way they're actually doing it, despite what The Sun/Hickenlooper's PR team would have you believe. Terrible music, dim 90's lighting and a Desperado-style montage of positions? Come on, surely we've progressed further than that ...
IN CONCLUSION: It's hard to generate intrigue with such a vapid, spineless and naive central character, but it could have been done. If you must see it, leave your brain at home and go to look at the costumes or to gain inspiration for your next haircut.
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