FACTORY GIRL ss
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The bar for historical accuracy in Hollywood biopics hasn’t always been this high–paradoxically, it’s been rising even as the public has become more ignorant of history. During the studio era, writers frequently played around with the truth when telling the stories of great men and women. Michael Curtiz’s Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) portrayed song-and-dance man George M. Cohan as a devoted family man, artfully omitting the fact that he’d divorced and remarried, but 60 years later it’s still a classic. John Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), which chronicled the 16th president’s days as a young lawyer in Illinois, is one of our most treasured films precisely because it’s an exercise in mythmaking. (“When the legend becomes fact,” one of Ford’s later characters would declare, “print the legend.”) Those films and others like them were prized for capturing the person’s essence–or, in the case of the Ford film, the essence of how people felt about him.
The movie’s problems begin with the arrival of Hayden Christensen as Quinn, an aggressive folk-rock star who seduces Edie and antagonizes Warhol, prompting her ouster from the Factory crowd. Hickenlooper has called the character an amalgam of Dylan, Donovan, and Jim Morrison, but Christensen’s performance is an absurd caricature of Dylan, complete with shades, motorcycle, wild-man hair, and righteous put-downs. Though Dylan has denied that he and Sedgwick were ever romantically involved, Hickenlooper gives Edie and Quinn a candlelit sex scene. Dylan may be angry that this ostensibly fake character is so obviously meant to be him; for viewers the real drawback of Christensen’s lazy burlesque is that it fails so miserably to capture Dylan. Lack of accuracy can be excused, but not lack of truth.
