FACTORY GIRL
Fifteen Minutes of Fame as Punishment: In Edie Sedgwick, the Altered States of a
Cracked Image
PopcornReel.com Movie Review: "Factory Girl"
By Omar P.L. Moore/February 9, 2007
Siena Miller as Edie Sedgwick in "Factory Girl", which opens today in San
Francisco and neighboring cities. (Photo: The Weinstein Company)
Edie Sedgwick, a beautiful, sexy socialite of the
mid-sixties, became seduced and entranced by the world of Andy Warhol and was
never the same. A superstar model of sorts, an actress and heiress, fame and
fate converged and finally came crashing down on her. Before the year 1971 had
ended, Sedgwick's life would come to an abrupt end, with the abuse, drugs,
degradation and despair that framed her brief 28-year-existence returning to
hound her last days.
Director George Hickenlooper recreates Sedgwick's final few years in his dizzy,
magnetic "Factory Girl", which has a discreet touch of documentary to it but
above all does a truly splendid job evoking the era of the relationship between
Mr. Warhol's art (as commentary) and American pop-culture in the tumultuous
1960's.
Similarly, Sienna Miller scintillates as Sedgwick with a performance that
is physically demanding. Playing a wonderfully charismatic and engaging
character, Miller breaks Sedgwick into four: a woman wide-eyed with joy
and wonderment at the possibilities of liberation in a world away from her
sexually abusive father; a woman finding her new father in Andy Warhol; a woman
experiencing fame and triumph, experimenting with drugs, entertaining doubts and
enduring despair; and as a woman as drug rehab patient in The Cottage
Hospital in Santa Barbara, California (the city in which she was born
and raised), reflecting on her life, hopeful for what the future will bring.
Miller hits the target on all fronts, each portrayal emblematic of Sedgwick's
journeys, which ranged from the superficial to the sublimely surreal.
"Factory Girl" is shot with numerous film stocks, in Super 16 and conventional
feature film-length 35mm. The documentary feel isn't intrusive, only coming on
full blast during the end credits. On occasion, the film is evocative of
Warhol's own highly famous art, with bursts of vivid color plastered over iconic
images of Sedgwick as she reaches the heights of her fame, fortune and excess
under the flamboyant artiste Warhol's tutelage. There are glimpses of stark
black and white footage that seem to display either total immersion in a world
of focus on artistry on Warhol's part, or a world filled with emptiness and
isolation.
While Warhol surrounded himself with hangers-on, loyal servants, faithful
minders and centurion-types, there was no indication that either he or his art
ever broke deeper than the surface. The film suggests this through the
performance of Guy Pearce as Warhol. His pallid, ghostly complexion and
hardened features reflect or absorb nothing. Pearce does well and recreates the
high-pitched, faintly distant voice of the iconoclastic artist/film director to
a tee. His Warhol is continuously hidden and oblivious to everyone, even as he
is publicly engaged in every affair and detail that is possible.
The film's title suggests an ironic existence -- not as a woman breaking the
mold for stardom, but as an assembly line image of the fame industry, running on
a frenzied treadmill of trepidation waiting for the inevitable trip and downfall
from flavor-of-the-month status, to be recycled into the next "new girl on the
street". "Factory Girl" shows Edie as naive, innocent, trusting and tragically
heroic. Her big mistake in life she recalls in voiceover, is that she
didn't heed the words of a young Bob Dylan (played by Hayden Christensen)
warning Edie to get out of Warhol's world while the going was still good.
Edie's affair with Bob offered her the promise of genuine escape from both the
biological father who raped her from age eight and up, and the surrogate father
(whose own insecurities and feelings of inadequacy were juxtaposed against a
more wordly and confident Dylan who seemed intent on taking Sedgwick back to the
same harrowing childhood destinations. )
"Factory Girl" also features Mena Suvari as a former Warholite who resisted
puckering up to Warhol, and Jimmy Fallon, as Edie's best friend turned Warhol
right-hand man. Fallon does well here, and you will do well yourself to see
this film.
"Factory Girl" is rated R by the Motion Picture Association of America.
The film's duration is 87 minutes, but seems much longer given the subject
matter. The film was released by MGM and The Weinstein Company.
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