Factory Girl is the as-yet-unreleased film about the
relationship between the pop culture artist Andy Warhol (Guy Pearce) and one of
his entourage, a rich wild child named Edie Sedgwick (Sienna Miller), whose
appearances in Warhol's bohemian films and at his side in social functions
during the 1965-66 era gave her the metaphorical fifteen minutes of fame Warhol
once spoke of. Sedgwick managed to turn a casual introduction to Warhol into a
strange relationship in which the artist seemed to promote the rich girl as his
doppelganger.
Eventually Sedgwick developed other interests and parted company
with Warhol. In the film's version of the story, she betrayed her mentor by
shifting her cultural allegiance to another icon, Bob Dylan (as portrayed by
Darth Vader!), thus violating Warhol's one and only commandment that his
followers could worship no other gods. The choice of Dylan was particularly
distasteful to Warhol since the folk singer despised the crass commercialism,
the gossipy backstabbing, and the high school style of social stratification
which characterized Warhol's studio (the titular Factory). When Dylan got
married to another woman and Warhol cast her aside, Sedgwick degenerated into a
spiral of self-pity and substance abuse that would eventually claim her life at
age 28.
As I watched Factory Girl, I was wondering to myself, "Why did
the filmmakers make this story?" You have to believe that they thought it was an
interesting and involving story, or an enlightening one, or one that would offer some moral
lesson, or some combination of those three elements, but in reality it is none
of the three. To begin with, all of the characters are unsympathetic. Worse still they are
uninteresting. Warhol and his confederates never seem to have anything
worthwhile to say. Their entire artistic conceit seems to consist of terse
verbal irony. Of course, that portrayal does seem to offer a fairly good reflection of Warhol's
attitude toward everything. His artistic stock in trade was to ridicule trash not
by vilifying it, but by deifying it and (presumably) sneering condescendingly
when the bourgeois suckers bought his works without realizing that their taste
was being ridiculed even as they wrote the checks. This sort of ironic posturing
doesn't translate well into dialogue. Warhol just sounds like a complete ass
when he drawls out a "well, that was nice" dripping with insincerity, or when he
asks Sedgwick if she's already spent the fifty dollars he gave her months
earlier. Perhaps Warhol was creepy, unsympathetic, shy, and a bit of a dullard,
but he had to have some qualities that elevated him to the level he reached. He
became the very symbol of a time and place, and the qualities that got him there
are not in evidence in this script. Moreover, Warhol's hangers-on seemed to think it
was fun to hang with him every night until all hours, but the reason for that
attitude cannot be seen here. The group seems to consist of a bunch of snobs
waiting for someone to slip so that they can judge him or her harshly. They're
like vampires feeding on one another's blood.
Sedgwick's own story is just one more of those "innocents caught
in the maelstrom of fame" tales, and I didn't see any new spin to make this one
worth watching. It's a grade-B version of Jolie's interpretation of Gia Carangi.
Edie comes off as a spoiled, shallow and giggly airhead - Warhol's
designated eye candy, with no real contribution to make to the Factory team, as if
she were the Paris Hilton of her own age, which I suppose she was. (She even
mentions that she stopped wearing underwear.) The script tries to gain some
depth by positing a relationship between her troubled home life and her ultimate
collapse, but that is treated superficially and obliquely, so that we never know
whether the things she says about her family really have any bearing on her
fate, or whether they are even true.
You would think that a film with no entertainment value would at
least be a good history lesson, but that's not the case. Sedgwick's
rumored romantic relationship with Bob Dylan, which Dylan always denied, is
treated as if it were an established fact. Dylan and his lawyers raised enough
of a stink about the portrayal that the character was renamed so that the film
could be released without legal problems. Of course the guitar-toting,
harmonica-playing character still looks, dresses, and talks exactly like Dylan,
and no effort is made to disguise his identity, but since his name is "Billy
Quinn," and since every other character in the film uses the name of a real
person, Billy Quinn can't be Dylan. Ahem. Wink-wink. Nudge-nudge.
So one is neither entertained by this film nor involved in it, and one
cannot reliably learn from it. In short, this is just a very weak film. It only runs 83
minutes between the credits, but it seems longer than War and Peace. In fact, it
seems longer than the actual Napoleonic Wars, because it really has nothing to
engage the audience, and is basically just an extended celebrity impersonation skit
like the kind they used to do on SCTV.
Except without the laughs.
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