>>REVIEW
FACTORY GIRL
STARRING Sienna Miller, Guy Pearce and Hayden Christensen
DIRECTED BY George Hickenlooper
Opens Friday, March 2
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Capturing an era rich with icons who were created, exploited and forgotten with lightning speed is no easy task, and filmmaker George Hickenlooper has fashioned a reasonably convincing vignette of the chaotic New York arts scene, circa 1965.
The film orbits around the Factory, a hub of pretentiousness and boundless drugs where hedonism is de rigueur. Andy Warhol (Guy Pearce) is the self-appointed patriarch of a pack of martini-swilling wannabes. Manhattan is depicted as the sort of place where blotchy-faced outcasts such as Warhol can make it big with the right kind of Upper West Side buzz.
Edie Sedgwick (Sienna Miller) enters the party, full of charm and naiveté
and captures the imagination of Warhol. Although he’s gay, Warhol is smitten with the young socialite. She battles for his art and is quickly ensconced as his full-time muse and party companion. Before long, their narcissistic art movies take the scene by storm. Standing ovations ensue in packed theatre houses in Paris and beyond.
The media frenzy that follows is convincingly captured, with the pop of flash bulbs and champagne corks providing the soundtrack to their high-profile lives. A brief affair with Billy Quinn (Hayden Christensen), a thinly disguised Bob Dylan, is the catalyst for the conflict between Sedgwick and Warhol, and she is helplessly pitted against her best friend and lover.
Pearce is riveting and somewhat despicable as the deeply insecure and tragically aloof Warhol. Chuck Wein (Jimmy Fallon) does little to intervene when things begin to go sour for his friend, and is easily seduced by Warhol’s world. Fallon shows he has dramatic depth and is sadly underutilized.
A gratuitously long and unnecessary love scene between Sedgwick and Quinn belongs in some smarmy romantic comedy, not here, and it is at this point the film loses its lustre.
Christensen is much too tall and handsome to be a believable Dylan, and he comes off as smug and self-righteous. Miller is impeccable as Sedgwick, lithely conveying the right mixture of guileless charm and poor little rich girl blasé accent. Her life is filled with heart-wrenching tragedies, yet she steadfastly believes in art for art’s sake. When she is consumed by the drugs she uses to quiet her inner demons, her high-society life takes a nose dive.
Sadly, none of the key men in her life is able or willing to rescue her from the destruction she brings upon herself, and she quietly slips away. Factory Girl starts with sparkle but quickly fades, leaving nothing but a bland recollection of a tragic life that deserves so much more. |
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