Movie Review: Factory Girl

Sienna Miller as Edie

The REAL Edie

I have to admit, I didn't know squat about Edie Sedgwick before I saw this movie. I mean, I knew that she died young, and that she had something to do with Andy Warhol in the sixties, but aside from that, not much. In truth, I think I had her mixed up with Jean Seberg. But I saw a preview for this new movie, and thought, well, that could be interesting, so I hauled Stephanie with me to see it.

This isn't a great film, indeed, one might wonder why the producers even felt they had to make it. The writing at times feels careworn, and the subject doesn't hold our attention in the way a biography of say, Vivien Leigh or Coco Chanel would, but in terms of its performances, it is compelling, and given its limitations, it performs very well. It stars Sienna Miller as Edie Sedgwick, and a nearly unrecognizable Guy Pearce as Warhol, and a surprisingly convincing Hayden Christensen as a nameless character simply called the Musician, but who is obviously a fictional carbon copy of a young Bob Dylan.

Being a bio-flick, the movie, not surprisingly, is done in flashback, with Sedgwick talking to a counsellor or shrink in a rehab clinic, recalling her days as a young art school dropout all set to take New York City by storm. She meets up with Warhol, and becomes his muse, and seems to break through his near pathological remoteness, only to have it rebound on her as she becomes more and more dependent on drugs and her life becomes increasingly chaotic and confused.

Sienna Miller, (whom I've previously never thought much of) is simply staggering as Sedgwick. It helps I suppose that she bears an uncanny resemblance to the late model, but more than that, she has an ability to make you care about this poor little rich girl who supposedly had it all, and then threw it away. That Sedgwick was damaged by her family, and in particular by her father is undeniable, but what catches your heartstrings is how Miller makes you believe Edie is fighting to keep her head above all of that childhood trauma, and trying to get past it. When she argues with Christensen's Musician about his dismissal of the triviality of the life she leads, she keeps her head and argues forcefully about his hypocrisy in being the singer-poet of the people, who happens to also revel in being a superstar having his picture splashed in all the newspapers. Edie might be vulnerable and self-destructive, and make appallingly bad choices, but in Miller's hands, she makes it clear that she is never stupid.

This isn't an easy movie to watch. If you have a phobia about needles, it will be that much harder. But it is a fascinating viewpoint into an era that for all of its supposedly glamourous and wildly innovative art scene, was really a very amorphous public spectacle of screwed up narcissists who called themselves artists. Warhol may have been a genius, (Edie certainly thought he was) but in this movie he's more of an emotional vampire, so remote in himself that he floods his work with other people's emotion in order to make it live. Edie in that sense was made to order for him. He exploits her and exploits her until she's so broke, she's reduced to doing drugged out pornography to survive. The facts of their relationship are probably more complicated than the movie has us believe, ie; "artist takes young innocent, turns her into his muse and then discards her" but it does make for a valid dramatic arc, and Pearce and Miller perform their roles flawlessly.

The ending does feel a bit forced and cliched, in that we've seen this ending on so many bio-pics before, but given the limits of biography, perhaps that can't be avoided. It isn't a film on par with Lawrence of Arabia, Iris, Basquiat, Before Night Falls, or even Frances, but it is performed well and movingly.

I don't know that it will be a big hit, as there is a cold cynicism that falls on the movie halfway through, and a sense of grimacing horror that hits the audience at the same time Edie starts to realize what is happening to her, and how Warhol is exploiting her. By this point, one realizes that everyone is exploiting everyone, and that in retrospect, Edie in the beginning exploited Warhol just as much as he would eventually exploit her. No one is exempt from blame in this world, the film seems to say, and if you're not a cutthroat Machiavellian bastard, you just won't survive. Edie certainly wasn't, therefore, it was only a matter of time before the horror consumed her.

Throughout the rest of the movie, that sense of horror never goes away, and by the end of the it, we are relieved just to be away from these people and their vampiric ways. That being said, it is a remarkable look into the sixties art scene, but as a moral fable of desiring notoriety as a substitute for love and as an exploration of the vapid and amorphous nature of fame, it does leave one with a significantly sour taste in one's mouth. You'll admire this movie for the acting, but it won't leave you feeling particularly good about humanity.

As an aside, it would be fascinating to do a double-feature of this movie and Julian Schnabel's Basquiat, about Jean Michel Basquiat, who was, ironically, another of Warhol's protogees who met an untimely end through drugs as well.

Or better yet, perhaps a double feature with Breakfast at Tiffany's.