"Factory Girl" is a fascinating period piece about a woman who embodied a moment in American culture and her tragic and almost too predictable demise.
Sienna Miller perfectly embodies socialite Edie Sedgwick, wither her joie de vivre, her fragility, and her complete disintegration into drug addiction. Hers was a lonely life lived all to briefly at the centre of a glittering and completely artificial world. Some criticize Miller for being nothing more than a fashion plate and celebrity girlfriend, but this film definitely show that Miller is, first and foremost, a talented actress. She manages to portray Sedgwick's manner, movements, diction, and style without making a caricature of her, someone that would have been easy in a less confident actress. Sienna, unlike many young actresses, brings a tremendous dynamism to her roles, with energy and a strong physicality that serves her well playing Sedgwick. Guy Pierce, despite being considerably handsomer than the real Warhol, does well with a difficult role. Andy Warhol himself was something of a self-manufactured entity. The man who best portrayed Andy Warhol was Andrew Warhola. Pierce's Warhol has a simian quality that differs from previous portrayals like that of Jared Harris in "I Shot Andy Warhol" and it make Warhol into, for better or for worse, into an ambiguous and even sinister character. Of the three main leads, Hayden Christensen's performance was by far the weakest, but on the other hand, he was also given the nearly impossible task of portraying Bob Dylan without actually being able to play Bob Dylan. His performance is superficial, as is his role within the story. He grasps Dylan's style but the character has no heart, a fatal flaw considering Dylan's position as one of the authentic and soulful voices of his generation.
Attempts to conform the story to a more Hollywood formula have distorted some of the ambiguity and contradictions that make it compelling. Edie Sedgwick undoubtedly was a victim of her dysfunctional family, and the ambitions of powerful men, but she was also reckless and spoiled. She would only travel in limos, and disparaged at taking cabs or the subway, and economizing was replacing her eyeshadow with watercolour paints. The film portrays her as a bon-vivant, whose lavish lifestyle caught with her rather as a reckless and foolhardy young woman who lacked a sense of personal and financial responsibility. She may have been confined to a mental hospital because she witnessed her father having sex with her neighbour, but was also an anorectic and bulimic, a fact was that was compounded by her habitual use of amphetamines, with her weight eventually dwindling to nearly 90 lbs. At the end of the film, Edie says that nobody is to blame for the failures in her life, and that her bad actions resulted in eventually disastrous consequences, however, the blame of Edie's downfall is never really put on Edie's shoulders, rather on those of Musician and Warhol. Absolving Edie of the tragedy of her life seems a rather Hollywood way to make her more sympathetic but it diminishes from the power and dimensions of her character. Another flaw in the film is the Musician-Edie relationship. He is supposed to come off as a bard of authenticity, in opposition to Warhol, the shallow priest of glitter and mirrors. However, the Musician character is not sufficiently appealing to convince the audience that Edie would leave the Factory for him. In reality, Edie left the Factory for Dylan's milieu and the promise of a Hollywood career, and eventually took up with Dyaln's manager. "Factory Girl" is fundamentally the story of an artist and his damaged muse, their estrangement, and her eventual downfall. Everything else is simply unnecessary. However, unlike what many reviewers of the film seem to think, these are not fatal flaws, and while the story does suffer from them, the film is still a compelling work of art.
The sets and costumes are particularly vibrant and colourful and evocative in creating a beautiful, stylish, and carefree, and insidious world. A film like this can make or break on the accuracy of the sets, costumes, and the general "period feel". Tremendous attention is paid to costuming, particularly in achieving Edie's iconic look. Sienna Miller looks magnificent with Edie's Kohl-rimmed Cleopatra eyes, black leotards and mod wardrobe. The production uses replicas of pieces that Sedgwick actually wore, and they are worn in such a way that one does not notice that there are actually very few actually pieces (Edie, for instance, wears a pair of butterfly shoulder dusters several times throughout the production) until about the fifth viewing. The Factory with its aluminum plastered and assorted doppelgangers, is alternately an absurdist Wonderland and psychedelic cesspool Indeed, the entire production evokes an entire world of easy glamour, hedonism, and creativity, which no longer exists. Some schizophrenic camera work is fashionable and typically for films of the psychedelic genre, and the director pushes the technique to the utmost borders of cliché, but does not enter it.
In all, Factory Girl is not the disastrous embarrassment that it is made out to be but a fascinating if flawed period piece about a young woman's high flight to the epitome of glamour and fame, and crash into misery, addiction, and degradation
Sienna Miller perfectly embodies socialite Edie Sedgwick, wither her joie de vivre, her fragility, and her complete disintegration into drug addiction. Hers was a lonely life lived all to briefly at the centre of a glittering and completely artificial world. Some criticize Miller for being nothing more than a fashion plate and celebrity girlfriend, but this film definitely show that Miller is, first and foremost, a talented actress. She manages to portray Sedgwick's manner, movements, diction, and style without making a caricature of her, someone that would have been easy in a less confident actress. Sienna, unlike many young actresses, brings a tremendous dynamism to her roles, with energy and a strong physicality that serves her well playing Sedgwick. Guy Pierce, despite being considerably handsomer than the real Warhol, does well with a difficult role. Andy Warhol himself was something of a self-manufactured entity. The man who best portrayed Andy Warhol was Andrew Warhola. Pierce's Warhol has a simian quality that differs from previous portrayals like that of Jared Harris in "I Shot Andy Warhol" and it make Warhol into, for better or for worse, into an ambiguous and even sinister character. Of the three main leads, Hayden Christensen's performance was by far the weakest, but on the other hand, he was also given the nearly impossible task of portraying Bob Dylan without actually being able to play Bob Dylan. His performance is superficial, as is his role within the story. He grasps Dylan's style but the character has no heart, a fatal flaw considering Dylan's position as one of the authentic and soulful voices of his generation.
Attempts to conform the story to a more Hollywood formula have distorted some of the ambiguity and contradictions that make it compelling. Edie Sedgwick undoubtedly was a victim of her dysfunctional family, and the ambitions of powerful men, but she was also reckless and spoiled. She would only travel in limos, and disparaged at taking cabs or the subway, and economizing was replacing her eyeshadow with watercolour paints. The film portrays her as a bon-vivant, whose lavish lifestyle caught with her rather as a reckless and foolhardy young woman who lacked a sense of personal and financial responsibility. She may have been confined to a mental hospital because she witnessed her father having sex with her neighbour, but was also an anorectic and bulimic, a fact was that was compounded by her habitual use of amphetamines, with her weight eventually dwindling to nearly 90 lbs. At the end of the film, Edie says that nobody is to blame for the failures in her life, and that her bad actions resulted in eventually disastrous consequences, however, the blame of Edie's downfall is never really put on Edie's shoulders, rather on those of Musician and Warhol. Absolving Edie of the tragedy of her life seems a rather Hollywood way to make her more sympathetic but it diminishes from the power and dimensions of her character. Another flaw in the film is the Musician-Edie relationship. He is supposed to come off as a bard of authenticity, in opposition to Warhol, the shallow priest of glitter and mirrors. However, the Musician character is not sufficiently appealing to convince the audience that Edie would leave the Factory for him. In reality, Edie left the Factory for Dylan's milieu and the promise of a Hollywood career, and eventually took up with Dyaln's manager. "Factory Girl" is fundamentally the story of an artist and his damaged muse, their estrangement, and her eventual downfall. Everything else is simply unnecessary. However, unlike what many reviewers of the film seem to think, these are not fatal flaws, and while the story does suffer from them, the film is still a compelling work of art.
The sets and costumes are particularly vibrant and colourful and evocative in creating a beautiful, stylish, and carefree, and insidious world. A film like this can make or break on the accuracy of the sets, costumes, and the general "period feel". Tremendous attention is paid to costuming, particularly in achieving Edie's iconic look. Sienna Miller looks magnificent with Edie's Kohl-rimmed Cleopatra eyes, black leotards and mod wardrobe. The production uses replicas of pieces that Sedgwick actually wore, and they are worn in such a way that one does not notice that there are actually very few actually pieces (Edie, for instance, wears a pair of butterfly shoulder dusters several times throughout the production) until about the fifth viewing. The Factory with its aluminum plastered and assorted doppelgangers, is alternately an absurdist Wonderland and psychedelic cesspool Indeed, the entire production evokes an entire world of easy glamour, hedonism, and creativity, which no longer exists. Some schizophrenic camera work is fashionable and typically for films of the psychedelic genre, and the director pushes the technique to the utmost borders of cliché, but does not enter it.
In all, Factory Girl is not the disastrous embarrassment that it is made out to be but a fascinating if flawed period piece about a young woman's high flight to the epitome of glamour and fame, and crash into misery, addiction, and degradation