FACTORY GIRL

By
Shannon Onstot
Community Relations Manager
KUNV 91.5 FM
University of Nevada Las Vegas
email: smonstot@yahoo.com

 

Factory Girl is everything it sets out to be: dramatic, mod, gritty and slightly snobbish. If you go into the film knowing that it’s going to be exactly that, then you’ll leave knowing it achieved its purpose. Factory Girl doesn’t pretend to be anything it’s not and embraces the fact that the film, and Warhol’s real-life Factory was over the top, ridiculous and vacant. What I loved about this film was that it didn’t make everything so obvious, and actually portrayed the tragic subject, Edie Sedgwick, with some grace, heart and honesty.

Sienna Miller plays Sedgwick, an heiress who is trying to become an artist and gets caught up in Andy Warhol’s world of meaningless film and iconic art. Sedgwick had dreams of becoming Holly Golightly (even if she’s never read Breakfast at Tiffany’s or even seen the film), so she drops out of art school at Radcliffe and begins modeling and acting. Normally, I don’t find Sienna Miller very interesting, and usually she’s pretty forgettable in her films, so I didn’t have very high hopes. I must say I was blown away by Miller’s transformation from her usually bland self into Sedgwick’s pseudo-glamorous train wreck personality.

Sedgwick gets involved with drugs, mainly speed, and loses control over everything. She spends too much money, drinks a ridiculous amount of martinis, and she dwells in her past too much. She can’t help but rehash the early deaths of two of her brothers, and continually blames her cold, heartless and alleged molester of a father for all her woes. She predicts in the beginning of the film that she never felt like she would live past 30, so you know she is doomed to begin with. The film is mostly about her happiest years, spent with Andy, and how quickly her dynamic personality and beauty faded away. She lost everyone important to her, including Andy, and seemed very fragile from the start.

Guy Pearce was a surprising casting choice for the part of Andy Warhol, but I think he did a great job and definitely convinced me. There were times when I thought that he seemed entirely too cold to Sedgwick, and even heartless. I don’t know too much about Warhol myself, but from what I do know, it was never that he didn’t care about Sedgwick’s destitution, but that she became a different person and he couldn’t see the person he was so fascinated by to begin with. It’s up to interpretation, but I think writers added more drama and confrontation then there really had been.

There were a few things I didn’t like about this film at all. The big controversy over this film is the character of “Billy Quinn,” played by Hayden Christensen. Bob Dylan is threatening legal action because the character is obviously modeled after him. I thought the writers did some careful backtracking to prevent any major lawsuits, and that was obvious in the script. Especially since Sedgwick never calls her lover by his name, not even when she’s introducing him to people. Christensen did an awful job in general. I can’t get over the fact that he seems like just a pretty face. He tries too hard to emulate Dylan, and takes it over the top so much he becomes irritating.

One part I loved was the look the film gave into Andy’s relationship with his mother, Julia Warhol, played by Beth Grant. He obviously gathered a lot of inspiration from her home, and from the icons of his childhood. When the director decided to focus in on a can of tomato soup in her cupboard though, it was a little too much. There were a few parts when the novelty of Warhol’s work became more of the focus, rather than his relationship with Sedgwick and his personality in general.

Overall, I loved this film. There were a few things I could have done without, which is why I didn’t give it a perfect rating. I thought it was a beautiful, insightful and honest work though. Watching the film becomes like looking at Andy Warhol’s work in person, and that is this film’s strength by far. It’s colorful, superficial, vibrant, but has a dark, gritty and sad underbelly.