Factory Girl Review

By Matt Langer

This film delivers in the new category of vacuous, misrepresentative works of pseudo-non-fiction. Sometime documentary director and one-time narrative director George Hickenlooper’s (this is his actual name) look at “Factory Girl” Edie Sedgwick is notable for how superficial and banal he can make the work of an artistic genius appear.

Factory Girl tells the story of Edie Sedgwick “a poor little rich girl” cut from the cloth of Massachusetts blue bloods who then somehow haphazardly falls into the fray of Andy Warhol’s New York factory art scene. Edie before becoming prey to the same fate that befalls many overnight success stories (drug addiction, rehab, subsequent drug overdose) is taken up in a romantic whirlwind by Bohemian musician Billy Quinn. Quinn is based on Bob Dylan, not surprisingly the film’s portrayal was one so clichéd and hackneyed that Dylan threatened to sue. If Dylan’s reaction to this caricature was so bad Warhol must have been doing cartwheels in his grave at Guy Pierce’s mustache twisting, maniacal rendition of the Pop artist.

Warhol is vilified, depicted as exploiter who calculatingly propels his own mythology via Edie and then dumps her when her hour is up. However before Edie gets dropped like a hot rock she appears in New York wide-eyed and bushy-tailed with only her daddy’s money and deer-in-the-headlights look of insouciance to keep herself afloat. The depth of her confessions through her narration is astounding. “We were experiencing life on our own terms!” “It was a perpetual party, one that I was happy to lose myself in!”

Yay! If only the same was possible for the audience of this film. However I frequently found myself jarred into consciousness at how clichéd the representations of the characters and time were. Warhol becomes enraged when Edie’s attention to him wavers after the passion of her love affair with Quinn heats up. Edie soon after her rise from trust-fund obscurity into the first “it” girl (whatever it is I’m not sure), plummets into the fairytale land of drug use that Hickenlooper depicts so artfully. In the establishing scene that introduces the Factory a bunch of Hipsters are seen frolicking on the ground with a tank of laughing gas. Warhol’s Factory is depicted as a Chuckee Cheese for the sexually ambiguous, creative mindset; Brillo Boxes strewn haphazardly around, stencils from his numerous famous lithographs in the works, and the maniacal genius lording his absolute authority over all. Hickenlooper makes sure to grant Warhol the air of a cult leader, more Branch Davidian than Benevolent conceptual artist. So much for Pop art genius!

Quinn becomes the rift in the friendship between Edie and Andy and there is even a brief moment of tension where the viewer is deceived into thinking there maybe a fracas in the studio among Quinn’s crew and Andy’s. I could see Hickenlooper choreographing a fight scene reminiscent of the battle between the Sharks and the Jets a la West Side Story except instead of using knives there would be pills and joints. Despite all the contrived aggression that develops between these characters, the fictitious maliciousness that the director portrays, there are brief glimpses of mediocrity through the total misrepresentation and creative banality. Sienna Miller does deserve credit for being nude in so many scenes and not catching a cold. However there is a strange disproportion between the amount of pathos the tear-jerking performance cries for and the amount of empathy that is actually released from the audience. In one scene Edie pleads with her father’s lawyer for money as she begins her dive to the bottom, she startlingly confesses her abuse at the hands of her father and this line is conveniently thrown out like the trash for the audience to consume and feed into the pool of remorse that this film calls out for. This scene stacked up between another when Edie is strung-out naked on a bed and her ass twitches, I think I’ll take the ass twitch. More direct and to the point, truthful and ass far as ass twitches are concerned beautifully executed.

The newly released DVD version promises a new cut packed with even “Sexier” scenes. The advertisement repeatedly uses the words sexy on the screen (reminiscent of that Anti-Gore election commercial a few years back with the word “Rats”) as if a soft-core porn show would be the only redeeming purpose of seeing this film.

The one purposeful thing that you can take from Factory Girl is the ironic similarity between the post-modern theme of many of Warhol’s works and the actual creative content of this film. The poetic irony of this film (probably something Hickenlooper never caught onto) is that Warhol’s lithographs are a great deal like the picture painted of Edie, reproduced infinitely in a variety of colors, completely one-dimensional, and totally removed from an actual accurate representation of their subject.

© LameMovies.net