|
|
Features
|
|
A Delightfully Forthright Girl
With Factory Girl and the requisite slew of just-a-girl style profiles, Sienna Miller is making a play for front of the line individual stardom.
Monday, June 18, 2007 at 11:00 AM
By Brent Simon
|
|
|
Anthony Harvey/WireImage.com
Photo
|
|
The spark to her celebrity
|
|
Of all the myriad, funnily named crayons in the jumbo-sized Crayola boxes that graced the grubby, communal tables of musty, elementary after-school programs, I remember the hue for “Burnt Sienna” with unerring clarity. A ruddy mixture of orange, brown and red, it recalled the type of thick clay found around Eastern seaboard construction sites - the sort that would streak and stain pavement with the rain, leaving thick tire marks of accompaniment for blocks in either direction.
And if you accidentally stepped in it and didn’t soon find a wet patch of grass to work it off your shoe, well, it was bound to travel with you and then leave its mark on your parents’ or friends’ carpet.
Similarly, actress Sienna Miller leaves a distinctive mark. A rising starlet who first made her name - or, more accurately, had it foisted upon her - as Jude Law’s girlfriend, initially onscreen in Alfie, then offscreen and throughout the tabloids, Miller is now making her way in Hollywood sans romantic entanglements, thank you very much. Or trying to, at least, though perhaps not hard enough.
The theatrical release of her latest film, Factory Girl - new this week on DVD - brought suspiciously timed tabloid buzz, complete with foolishly coy circumventions from its director that Miller and co-star Hayden Christensen engaged in actual sex during their onscreen lovemaking trysts. Both the New York Post and Daily News reported on the story - the latter apparently asking Miller about it in front of her parents at the film’s premiere – a strand that was soon picked by the National Ledger and TMZ.com, among others.
|
|
Jim Spellman/WireImage.com
Photo
|
|
Director George Hickenlooper
|
|
|
Which brings us to a point about Miller, an exemplar for Hollywood up-and-comers in general. Is this enthusiastically peddled fusion of “celebutante” faux-news headlines, romantic innuendo and, you know, the actual work, any way to advance a fledgling career? Probably not.
Still, though currently far less guilty than many in her peer set at this sort of rank-level twaddle, there’s a residual film of tabloid glaze that clings to Miller and thus qualifies her work. The heartily pitched, Weinstein-backed new narrative antidote to this, then - ever scrupulous in its fanciful impudence - involves painting Miller as a klutzy, breezy, charming straight-shooter from ah-cross the pond.
All the major profiles on Miller of late (Esquire, Los Angeles Times, etc.) have gazed through this lens, and meeting her in person, one can immediately see why. Miller doesn’t float into a room; she merely enters, beams and plops down. If promoting her movie never particularly seems like more than work, she’s not glum, bothered or unhappy to do it. Digressive questions about her personal life, fashion choices or off-the-cuff comments about the titular host city of her just-wrapped The Mysteries of Pittsburgh don’t elicit irritation, but rather the same type of roundabout, serially self-effacing answers as questions about character and nuts-and-bolts production.
|
|
James Devaney/WireImage.com
Photo
|
|
On set with co-stars Jimmy Fallon and Guy Pearce
|
|
|
“Things kind of happened all backwards,” Miller insists when speaking to FilmStew. She is alluding of course to the notoriety gained through her relationship with Law. “I became known not even for any of the movies that I’d done, but just for fashion and being out in the public eye, which was weird, but…” Here she shrugs. “Oh well. It is what it is.”
Ask Miller about nudity, meanwhile - be it the scenes in her movies or posing topless last year for Vanity Fair - and she reacts with an effusive combination of sheepishness and bemusement that’s hard to affect. “Oh, they spend hours lighting it,” she chirps with a wave of the hand, “and they spray your bum [to color it] and smooth out the cellulite that all girls have, I’m sorry to say.”
Directed by George Hickenlooper, Factory Girl is set against the backdrop of doomed, avant-garde experimentation that characterized the mid-’60s pop scene. Miller stars as trailblazing scene-ster Edie Sedgwick — a trust fund princess, serial art dabbler and aspirant actress who became counterculture painter and part-time moviemaker Andy Warhol’s most famous muse. The film charts Edie’s comet-like rise and fall, her romance with a folk musician bearing a suspicious resemblance to Bob Dylan, and how she came to define both the glamour and the tragedy of the earliest stages of a celebrity-obsessed culture.
|
|
Jim Spellman/WireImage.com
Photo
|
|
At the New York premiere of Factory Girl
|
|
|
Though it’s sprinkled with cameos and supporting turns from a recognizable cast — including Guy Pearce as Warhol and the aforementioned Christensen as that Dylan-esque singer, plus Jimmy Fallon, Mena Suvari, Shawn Hatosy and Illeana Douglas — Factory Girl is very much the perfect film for an already somewhat recognizable young actress looking for respect, since it’s rooted in scandalous truth. And as a star-making vehicle, full of polarity, it provides opportunities for both wounded dove oration and crazy acting out.
Miller admits that was a big part of the attraction of the role. “I was probably born too late, because I’ve always been obsessed with the whole ’60s era,” she says. “And there was something so extraordinary and captivating about Edie’s presence, especially her eyes.”
“There was a lot of strength, but there was also a lot of damage and frailty,” Miller observes. “She was headstrong and very fatalistic. She felt from very early on that her life was pretty much doomed. And she was such a huge, larger-than-life figure and she had so many iconic qualities — from her beautiful voice and beautiful dancing to that sense of innocence that she had — that I just wanted to get it all right. I really came to love her.”
Miller plays Edie with the sort of whimsical, buoyant self-assurance that, in a slightly more grounded, high school-age young woman, might leave a wake of smitten teen boys listening to their Cure or Morrissey CDs on repeat-play shuffle. In later scenes, as the drugs and drink consume more of Edie’s life, there’s just a pinch of quietly wounded bravado to the slurry downward spiral she reenacts.
“I think that the most important thing was to psychologically try to understand why she was the way she was,” says Miller. “From the exterior, you see this girl who came from a very privileged background and had an education, and then went to New York and took too many drugs and died. So people may say, ‘Why? Who cares?’ But once you start delving into it, you understand… why she was freaking out so much.”
“She had a really tortured background and a difficult upbringing,” she adds. “She was in and out of mental institutions, and had shock treatment at age 14. She was psychologically very disturbed. Once you [understand that] and empathize with it, then it justifies why she was just running away from reality — because reality, for her, most of her life, was quite a scary place.”
| Miller’s reality, though, is seemingly on the upswing, for reasons having to do as much with her own well-polished, genial personality as any manifested acting talent. Fleet of both foot and mouth, she possesses an unfiltered quality that’s refreshing — even if she frequently catches herself tumbling into double entendres or giving wry, cavalier ripostes that are decidedly not part of the vetted Weinstein Co. bulleted talking points, and then milks that air-quote transgression for all its worth. “Oh, see, this is what gets me in trouble and drives my publicist mad!” she says on more than one occasion.
| |
She’s no demure girl next door, this Miller. Whether DVD renters spark to this sauciness and getting burnt by Sienna, only time will tell.
|
|
|
|
|
 Email
|
 Print
|
|
|
|
|
|