‘Factory Girl’ does not exactly work
By Jillian Mapes, Assistant Managing Editor
April 3, 2007 | 1:50 p.m.
"Factory Girl," a film centered on Andy Warhol’s famous muse Edie Sedgwick, was bound to be a slight disaster. After all, it is difficult to make a biopic about someone who didn’t exactly achieve anything except being famous for little reason.
Edie Sedgwick (Sienna Miller) is a “poor little rich girl” with a flair for art who becomes a 1960s superstar after collaborating on obscure films with new friend Andy Warhol (Guy Pearce). After realizing that he could not control Edie as easily as he originally believed, Warhol quickly drops Sedgwick, thus reducing her life to little more than alternating trips between drug rehab and relapse. Their friendship proves legendary through out popular culture, and their break-up plays out in the media like that of Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie.
The film’s introduction sets the entire tone of “Factory Girl,” as a disheveled Edie is pictured running through the streets of New York City and the accompanying narration alludes to Sedgwick’s impending death. This first scene says it all: if audience members were looking for an upbeat period film about the eccentric adventures of Warhol and Co., then they chose the wrong movie.
“Factory Girl” is not a movie intended to tell the story of Andy Warhol, though the film would have been more interesting with Warhol as the main focus. This is because Warhol, in all his illustrious pop culture mystery, was famous for an actual reason, unlike Sedgwick. Furthermore, Guy Pearce does an exceptional job of capturing the lusciously awkward, deceptively passive aggressive essence of Warhol.
Besides Pearce’s magnetic performance as Warhol, the only other positive aspects of “Factory Girl” include the film’s retro score and the varying approaches to cinematography. A portion of “Factory Girl” appears in grainy black and white film in order to remain true to Warhol’s medium of choice, while other sections are filmed more like a documentary.
Although Sedgwick lived the pampered life of a trust fund kid, her character makes attempts to gain depth. There are flashes of this deeper being through out the film’s darker moments, such as when Edie is outcast by Warhol, The Velvet Underground and the cult-like posse of artsy hipsters that occupy Andy’s studio, The Factory.
Sienna Miller really tries to play Edie with the style and charisma that Sedgwick publicly portrayed, but the mod fashions and toothy grin are sometimes not enough to save the lack of character development and motivation within the film. The audience wants to know why Edie did the things that she did and why she was famous at all, but “Factory Girl” fails to deliver answers.
The filmmakers behind “Factory Girl” somehow manage to tell Edie’s story with some level of sadness. It wasn’t possible to feel bad for someone who pissed away a massive trust fund and was adored for simply being herself by an entire counterculture until this film. The audience can’t help but show a bit of sympathy for Edie, especially during one scene in which Warhol believes that a fifty dollar bill will serve as proper payment for Edie’s extensive work in his films, some of which border on pornographic.
One thing that “Factory Girl” doesn’t lack is a well-known cast of actors; however, this surplus of stars does not necessarily improve the overall quality of the film. Jimmy Fallon’s dismal performance as Edie’s annoyingly manipulative, gay socialite friend makes people wonder who was fired after casting Fallon in a serious role.
Additionally, Hayden Christensen stars as someone known simply in the film’s credits as “folk musician,” but who is also referred to as “Billy Quinn.” Either way, the mystery musician is a horrendous, arrogant caricature of Bob Dylan, with whom Edie has a steamy love affair. Even Dylan himself realizes that Christensen’s performance is a joke because he is threatening to sue the film’s producers if they attach his name to this musician character.
It’s ironic that “Factory Girl” is a movie whose biographical validity is now being questioned by the likes of Bob Dylan himself. This is the same film that begs the audience to be skeptical of Warhol after revealing his bitterly frigid side.
There is no question that Andy Warhol has recently gained popularity again among the demographic that first made him the ‘it’ artist of the 1960s - the young and the fashionable. What is to be questioned, however, is how the legions of girls sporting Warhol-print handbags and t-shirts view the enigmatic artist.
“Factory Girl” succeeds in making the audience hate Warhol, despite the fact he will always have a shiny pop image as the man behind the Soup Can paintings. And Edie Sedgwick lives on, despite disparaging attempts at inner depth, to be remembered simply as an artist’s muse and a beautiful face of a generation.
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For “Factory Girl” show times, visit the Athena Web site.
Grade: C-
Running Time: 91 minutes
MPAA Rating: R - for pervasive drug use, strong sexual content, nudity and language.
Category: Biopic, Drama