Edie Sedgwick: "Her fog, her amphetamine, and her pearls..."
katorzejames
from The Independent & The Independent on Sunday
24 February 2007 20:25
Edie Sedgwick: The life and death of the Sixties star
Rich, gorgeous and well-connected, Edie Sedgwick was the party girl
who lit up Andy Warhol's golden circle. As her life story comes to the
screen, Rhoda Koenig unravels a very Sixties tragedy
Published: 09 January 2007
"Her fog, her amphetamine, and her pearls..." With three nouns, in
"Just Like a Woman" (said to have been inspired by her), Bob Dylan
deftly summed up his friend Edie Sedgwick, the wayward princess of
Andy Warhol's multimedia Factory.
More than 30 years after her short, tumultuous life ended, Edie is
still causing ructions. Last month, Dylan threatened to sue the makers
of Factory Girl, a movie starring Sienna Miller as Edie, claiming that
he is defamed by Hayden Christensen's portrayal of a singer whose
rejection drives her to suicide.
This week, Edie's brother claimed that despite Dylan's insistence that
he and Edie never had a relationship, she became pregnant with his
child and had an abortion. The producers describe the harmonica-
playing character (named "Quinn" in the press notes, but never called
by name in the movie and identified only as "musician" in the credits)
as a composite - which Dylan's lawyer argues is no bar to defamation.
The movie, which was frantically re-cut prior to its Oscar-qualifying
release at one theatre in Los Angeles (though the director George
Hickenlooper says the changes had nothing to do with Dylan's
objections) will be edited again before its wider US release later
this month.
Early reviews have been mixed, with The Hollywood Reporter praising
its "bright intensity" and saying that Miller "brings to life
Sedgwick's legendary allure"; the Los Angeles Times calling it
"simplistic" and "superficial"; and Variety finding the movie "tame"
and Miller "whiny".
It's no surprise, though, that the film should provoke reactions as
varied as Edie herself did. To parents terrified of the influence of
sex and drugs, she was an abomination; to the would-be cool, she was
an ideal; to painters as eminent as Robert Rauschenberg, she was a
living work of art.
***
American aristocracy ruled that a lady's name should appear in the
papers only three times: when she was born, when she married, and when
she died. Edie Sedgwick changed that. As well as publicising her
appearances in underground movies, her numerous committals for mental
illness and drug addiction were widely reported. She met her future
husband - a fellow patient - in the psychiatric wing of the hospital
where she was born. On the last evening of her life, in 1971, she
appeared on television, and then went home to die of an overdose of
barbiturates. She was 28.
Edie's troubles began long before she was born. Her distinguished New
England lineage (a Sedgwick was Speaker of the House of
Representatives under George Washington, another edited the Atlantic
Monthly for a generation) was also distinguished by hereditary
madness, as far back as the Speaker's wife.
Edie's father (whose own father had moved his family to southern
California) had two nervous breakdowns soon after leaving university,
and his wife was told by her doctors that she must never have
children. But the rich do not like being told what to do, and the
Sedgwicks were rich-rich (not only had Edie's family inherited
millions; oil was discovered on their property, enough to sink 17
wells).
Mrs Sedgwick defied doctors and fate and had eight children, two of
whom died before Edie - one hanged himself, the other rode his
motorcycle into a bus. As a father, Francis Minturn "Duke" Sedgwick
was larger than life and much more terrible. A career as a monumental
sculptor and owner of a ranch that was his own little dukedom (the
children were tutored at home, and seldom left it) did not exhaust his
energies. He seduced, or at least made advances to, his wife's
friends, his children's friends and, Edie said, to her.
***
When Edie left California for Radcliffe, the women's college of
Harvard (the Sedgwick alma mater), she had already spent time in
mental hospitals, suffered from anorexia and had an abortion. What men
saw, however, was a delicate beauty and an appealingly vulnerable
quality. "Every boy at Harvard," said a former classmate, "was trying
to save Edie from herself."
The less high-minded boys flocked to Edie for other reasons - even at
wealthy Harvard, there were not too many students who drove their own
Mercedes, or were so uninhibited. At one boy's Sunday family lunch,
she left the table, walked out on to the lawn, stripped to her
knickers and lay down to sunbathe.
Bored in Boston, Edie decided to swap the role of college girl for
party girl and moved to New York, into the 14-room Park Avenue
apartment of her obliging grandmother. At 21, she came into money of
her own and got a flat - and clothes, clothes, clothes. Her stick
figure, huge eyes and chopped-off hair suited the style of the early
Sixties - Jean Seberg in the movies, Twiggy in the glossies- and Edie
was, briefly, on the fashion pages.
Life magazine said she was "doing more for black tights than anybody
since Hamlet". The Vogue empress Diana Vreeland praised her
"anthracite-black eyes and legs to swoon over... She is shown here
arabesquing on her leather rhino to a record of The Kinks." But, well
before heroin chic, her drug-taking was becoming so notorious that
editors stopped calling.
In 1965, Edie met an impresario who was more her style: Andy Warhol.
Warhol and Edie were, horribly, made for each other. The Pittsburgh
boy, son of Polish immigrants, wanted the Wasp heiress's company more
fervently than any straight man wanted her body; the neglected
daughter craved the obsessive attention of a famous man who demanded
nothing from her in return. "If you had a father who read the paper at
the dinner table," said Viva, another of Warhol's film-stars, "and you
had to go up and turn his chin to even get him to look at you, then
you had Andy, who would press the 'on' button of the Sony the minute
you opened your mouth."
Edie introduced Warhol to her real father, but their one meeting was
not a success. The artist thought Duke Sedgwick the most handsome
older man he had ever seen, but the rancher said afterwards: "Why, the
guy's a screaming fag!"
Warhol's clothes became smarter under Edie's influence, and she dyed
her hair silver to match his. "I thought at first it was exploitative
on Andy's part," says the photographer Fred Eberstadt. "Then I changed
my mind and decided, if it was exploitative on any part, maybe it was
Edie's."
"Edie and Andy," the non-couple, were the couple of the moment. She
took him to parties where everyone else was listed in the Social
Register; he stage-managed her appearances, pushing Edie to the
cameras and the microphones, where she was white with fear but loved
every minute.
Edie became an habitué of the Factory, Warhol's loft papered in
aluminium foil, where the daytime was spent churning out silkscreen
prints and the night on parties that mingled guests who contributed
flash, trash and cash with a smorgasbord of illegal stimulants. (Some
left the place in limousines, some in ambulances, a regular said.)
Flash-bulbs popped and crowds on the wrong side of the rope screamed
when Edie turned up in leotards and her grandmother's leopard coat.
The Velvet Underground, Warhol's rock band, wrote a song, "Femme
Fatale", about her. Warhol put her in a movie called Horse, which,
contrary to what one might have expected from the title, was actually
about a horse. The actors, in cowboy gear, were brought together with
the stallion and a placard was held up that read: "Approach the horse
sexually, everybody." Edie was lucky for once - the indignant horse
kicked someone else in the head.
***
Edie appeared in Beauty Part II, her nervous radiance apparent from
the first. George Plimpton, a fellow aristocrat (who, with Jean Stein,
later put together the oral biography Edie) remembered seeing the
film, in which Edie, in bra and pants, lounged on a bed with a man
pawing her, while an offstage voice gave her instructions. "Her head
would come up, like an animal suddenly alert at the edge of a
waterhole, and she'd stare across the bed at her inquisitor in the
shadows... I couldn't get the film out of my mind."
Other films included Restaurant, Kitchen and the cruelly titled Poor
Little Rich Girl, with Edie back in bed in her underwear, putting on
make-up or answering offscreen questions in an offhand way. Her
dreaminess, like her hysteria, was fuelled by cocaine, alcohol, uppers
and downers, alone or combined.
Edie's favourite was a speedball - a shot of amphetamine in one arm,
heroin in the other. Several times she fell asleep while smoking in
bed; once she was badly burned as candles toppled while she slept.
Even then, her imprimatur was one the fashion world was eager to
claim. "When Edie set her apartment on fire," said Betsey Johnson,
"she was in one of my dresses."
Edie moved to the Chelsea Hotel, famous for its artistic clientele,
where she met Dylan - whose song "Leopardskin Pillbox Hat" she is
supposed to have inspired as well - and his right-hand man, the record
producer Bob Neuwirth, with whom she had an affair.
However, Jonathan Sedgwick, Edie's brother, says: "She called me up
and said she'd met this folk singer in the Chelsea, and she thinks
she's falling in love. I could tell the difference in her, just from
her voice. She sounded so joyful instead of sad. It was later on she
told me she'd fallen in love with Bob Dylan."
Some months later, he says, she told him she had been hospitalised for
drug addiction and that when doctors discovered she was pregnant, they
carried out an abortion, over her protests. "Her biggest joy was with
Bob Dylan, and her saddest time was with Bob Dylan, losing the child.
Edie was changed by that experience, very much so."
Dylan's lover of record at the time was Joan Baez. Soon after they
broke up, he married Sara Lownds; Edie was said to have been
devastated when she heard the news from someone else.
Even with her inheritance gone, and unable to count on money from
home, Edie wouldn't economise. In all the time she lived in New York,
she took the subway only once - to Coney Island, in a feathered
evening gown over a bikini. The rest of the time it was limousines.
She would never even settle for a taxi.
At the end of 1966, Edie went to California for Christmas. At the
Chelsea, they were relieved to see her go - there would be terrible
scenes in the lobby when she wasn't able to pay her bill, and she
never could stop setting her room on fire.
As soon as she got home, her parents had her committed. And as soon as
she could, she ran back to New York. But the spotlight never again
turned her way. In 1967, her father died. A friend said: "Finally.
Thank God. Now, maybe Edie can breathe."
But she became more depressed. Her money was gone, and she returned to
her grandmother's apartment, to steal antiques which she sold for drug
money. After eight months in increasingly grim and frightening mental
hospitals, in the last of which she was made to scrub the lavatories,
she returned, in 1968, to the ranch. But her drug habit had not ended,
and she took up with a motorcycle gang, trading sex for heroin. "She'd
ball half the dudes in town for a snort of junk," a friend said. "But
she was always very ladylike about the whole thing."
***
In Edie's last film, Ciao! Manhattan, whose scenario was even more
formless and bizarre than her own, she played a topless hitchhiker
living in a tent in an empty swimming pool. There was a non-simulated
orgy in a (full) swimming pool, fuelled by amphetamines and tequila.
Not just Edie but the whole cast were on speed; the film-makers had to
find a co-operative doctor and set up a charge account.
Edie showed off her new implants, but ascribed her larger breasts to
diet and exercise. She pretended to undergo electroshock treatments -
to which she was soon after subjected for real, in the hospital used
for the filming. She also recreated being given a shot of amphetamine
by one of the swinging doctors of the period, having to lie down
because she was too thin to take it standing up.
Roger Vadim and Allen Ginsberg, the latter naked and chanting, turned
up for some reason, and Isabel Jewell, the tough girl of such Thirties
films as Times Square Lady and I've Been Around, played her mother.
Edie would sometimes have convulsions from all the drugs she was
taking. The director of the film ordered his assistant: "Tie her down
if you have to."
In July 1971, in white lace, Edie married Michael Post, a student
eight years younger, whom she had turned from his vow to remain a
virgin until he was 21. Some guests threw confetti; one threw gravel.
Edie could not live alone, she said, and would not live with a nurse.
Post's job was to dole out her pills.
On 14 November, she went to a fashion show where she headed for the
cameras like a woman dying of thirst to an oasis. A man she met that
evening said she asked to come and see him the next day for a chat,
but they would need to have sex first, otherwise she'd be too nervous
to talk. The next morning, her husband woke to find her dead beside
him. Whether her death was accident or suicide, the coroner was unable
to determine. Post plays a bit part in the movie.
When Edie first crashed and burned, such stories of a misguided search
for freedom and self-expression were rare. By the time she died, they
were becoming common. Now, of course, there are too many to count. But
the carefree innocence and optimism of the early Edie's photographs
and films still resonate. "She was after life," said Diana Vreeland,
"and sometimes life doesn't come fast enough."
Factory Girl is released in February
Inside the Factory: who else was who in Warholia
The main man: Andy Warhol
The artist, film-maker and experimentalist-in-chief at the Factory,
Andy Warhol said everyone was going to be famous for 15 minutes. He
was famous for considerably longer.
The 'fotographer': Billy Name
One day, late in 1963, Andy Warhol became bored with operating his
complicated still camera, and handed the responsibility to one of his
"Superstars" - and a fellow experimental artist - Billy Name, who
would become the "Factory Fotographer".
The femme fatale: Nico
Nico (Christa Paffgen) - at various times the lover of John Cale, Jim
Morrison, Lou Reed, Jackson Browne, Tim Buckley, Iggy Pop and Brian
Jones - was an enigmatic German chanteuse who made an enormous
artistic contribution to the Warhol scene. The Velvet Underground
teamed up with her for their landmark tour Exploding Plastic
Inevitable. She also sang on their debut album and starred in Warhol's
Chelsea Girls. Died of a drugs overdose in 1989.
The writer: Truman Capote
Given that Capote's fame had been ensured by a 1948 dust-jacket
picture of him reclining on a chaise longue, it's no surprise that the
writer was at home in the Factory - where the Couch was a centrepiece
for a variety of collaborations.
The Welshman: John Cale
The Velvet Under-ground's instrumental engine room, and one of the few
artists to successfully bring rock viola to the masses, John Cale was
a proud Welshman and a Warhol acolyte. His stay in the Velvets,
though, was short-lived - he was only in the band for their first two
albums.
The transformer: Lou Reed
Very few people bought the Velvet Underground's early records when
they were first released. It didn't matter. Lou Reed and the gang's
place at the heart of Sixties' counter- culture was ensured, when, in
1965, Andy Warhol became their manager. The singer later documented
his time at the Factory in "Walk on the Wild Side".
The artist: Robert Rauschenberg
In 1964 Rauschenberg became the first American winner at the Venice
Biennale. He was the artist Warhol most admired, and feted at the
Factory. Warhol was surely listening when Rauschenberg remarked that
"the artist's job is to be a witness to his time in history".
The voice of a generation: Bob Dylan
Al Kooper once remarked of Bob Dylan's seminal 1966 album, Blonde on
Blonde, that it chronicled a "quintessential New York hipster." Dylan
- a regular at the Factory - might have denied that description
himself, but he certainly met a few at Warhol's salon.
The rock god: Mick Jagger
Just as Warhol designed the iconic cover for The Velvet Underground
and Nico, the Velvets' 1967 debut, he also created the artwork on
Sticky Fingers for his Factory friend, Mick Jagger. The crotch on the
cover, though, does not belong to any members of the world's biggest
rock band - it is thought to belong to Joe Dallesandro, a Factory
regular.
The model: Anita Pallenberg
Anita Pallenberg was fluent in four languages and three Rolling
Stones. And between growing up in Germany and settling in London this
pan-European actress and model became a regular at the Factory.
Author (?)
katorzejames
Warhol's Anointed Starlet, Drowning in the Glitterati
By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: February 2, 2007
It's not entirely inappropriate that "Factory Girl," George
Hickenlooper's biography of Edie Sedgwick, the most glamorous of Andy
Warhol's so-called superstars, should suggest a magazine layout
masquerading as a film. The world through which Sedgwick blazed and
burned out was one that lived and died by the camera. It existed to be
seen and drooled over. But God help you if you actually lived in it.
Patti Perret/Weinstein Company and Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Sienna Miller as Edie Sedgwick in "Factory Girl."
Fueled by speed, its denizens willfully extinguished their inner lives
with pharmaceuticals and put their fantasies on exhibition. In those
days mother's little helpers enjoyed a vogue as relatively harmless,
energy-producing psychic rocket fuel for naughty boys and girls to
stay up and party all night. We know better now.
When making a movie set in the recent past, you're dead if it doesn't
look authentic. And the kindest thing to be said about this deluxe
photo spread of a film is that Sienna Miller's Edie and Guy Pearce's
Andy capture their characters' images and body language with relative
precision. (Mr. Pearce is much prettier than the real Warhol; if Ms.
Miller doesn't have Sedgwick's throaty smoker's voice and aristocratic
air, she gives a furious, thrashing performance as a lost little rich
girl.) The crinkled tinfoil glitter of Warhol's East 47th Street
"Silver Factory" is accurately rendered, and the actors cast as
members of the Warhol entourage are reasonable physical
approximations.
It's the captions that are the problem. How do you discover the inner
life of people determined to live so fast and hard that they can
outrun their demons? How do you bring substance to charismatic
personalities whose glamour may camouflage a void?
Clinical terms like "narcissistic disorder" may be applied to such
people. But the disparity between surface and substance goes deeper
than that. The trade-off between the pursuit of stardom and self-
knowledge often means that when the camera is absent, there is no
there there. And it's futile to try and find one.
"Factory Girl" is structured around a 1970 therapy session for
Sedgwick in Santa Barbara, Calif., where she died of a barbiturate
overdose a year later at the age of 28. She is ever the whiny victim,
especially of her father, Fuzzy (James Naughton), who she says
sexually abused her since she was 8.
>From Santa Barbara the movie flashes back to Edie's departure from art
school in Boston for the bright lights of 1965 Manhattan with her
Svengali, Chuck Wein (Jimmy Fallon), who arranges her introduction to
Warhol. And so the circus begins. There are brief, revised re-
enactments of her appearances in several Warhol films.
In the movie's hostile portrayal of Warhol, that pop art giant comes
across as an emotional vampire who loathed his own appearance and used
Sedgwick as a vicarious mirror, then turned his back when she became
troublesome. The screenplay by Captain Mauzner includes none of
Warhol's deadpan oracular pronouncements about culture and art, nor
any outside observations about the meaning of it all.
In its search for a story "Factory Girl" invents a spurious power
struggle between Warhol and Bob Dylan (identified only as Musician
because his lawyers threatened to sue) for possession of Edie's soul.
It goes so far as to imagine an idyllic affair between Sedgwick and
Mr. Dylan that probably didn't take place. (She did, however, have an
affair with his close friend Bobby Neuwirth.) It seems to blame both
Warhol's and Mr. Dylan's rejections for her precipitous decline.
In this simplistic tug of war, Mr. Dylan is the God of authenticity
and inner truth and Warhol the Devil of superficiality and glitter,
but you wouldn't know it from the ludicrous mumbo-jumbo muttered by
the Dylan character (Hayden Christensen). If Mr. Christensen's rock
star is too sleek by half to be a credible Dylan (there's no dirt
under these fingernails), he comes with Mr. Dylan's accouterments of
the time - a cap, a harmonica and a motorcycle - and affects a
softened version of the singer's nasal sneer. The impersonation is
abysmal. The soundtrack includes no music by Mr. Dylan, whose "Like a
Rolling Stone" is one of several of his songs thought to be inspired
by Sedgwick. Instead we get Tim Hardin.
katorzejames
Factory Girl
Bottom Line: More successful as a slice of pop-culture history than as
a biopic, despite two powerful leads.
By Sheri Linden
Dec 29, 2006
Sienna Miller plays the ill-fated Andy Warhol muse Edie Sedgwick.
The story of New York it girl, fashion icon and Andy Warhol muse Edie
Sedgwick (1943-71) has taken on the proportions of a cult myth, as do
most true tales of brief, intense lives. Focusing on the year or so in
the mid-1960s when she burned brightest and crashed most dramatically,
"Factory Girl" boasts its own bright intensity, fueled in large part
by leads Sienna Miller and Guy Pearce. Director George Hickenlooper
captures the energy and ultra-irony of Warhol's scene, but his
attempts to give the film a conventional biopic arc end up wallowing
in dime-store psychology. The central performances will generate
strong word-of-mouth for the picture, which enters limited release
today.
A work-in-progress version that the Weinstein Co. screened only weeks
ago had a rawer, more immediate power than the final cut. In
particular, the addition of a framing interview set in 1970 -- with
Miller's Sedgwick in scrubbed California-girl mode, having abandoned
Manhattan, heavy eyeliner and hard drugs -- has a defusing effect,
explaining what already is evident, especially when it is used in
voice-over. Intercut talking-head comments from the likes of George
Plympton and one of Sedgwick's brothers, which provided far more
interesting context and commentary than the current narration by
Sedgwick, are now relegated to the end-credits sequence.
Some of the changes might have to do with Bob Dylan's objections to
the original script and threatened legal action. He apparently was
concerned that the film would draw a cause-and-effect line between the
end of his relationship with Sedgwick and her suicide. (Sedgwick has
long been viewed as a key inspiration to "Blonde on Blonde"-era Dylan,
but whether they did indeed have a love affair appears less likely.)
Coyly unnamed in the film, the famous, scruffy musician who
temporarily draws Edie out of the Warhol orbit is clearly based on
Dylan. If anything, though, the character, played by a charismatic
Hayden Christensen, comes across as the sole voice of reason in
Sedgwick's increasingly out-of-control life.
"Factory Girl" draws a too-easy opposition between the musician's
authenticity and the artificiality of Warhol's world of surfaces. But
at its strongest, it explores a timeless tension between style and
substance, form and meaning. At the center of this tug of war is the
blueblood gamine Sedgwick, a striking beauty and would-be artist whose
unique glamour snags Warhol's heart, inasmuch as he will admit to
having one.
Perhaps the cruelest irony of Sedgwick's story, as it is presented
here, is that she escapes her troubled family, albeit on trust-fund
purse strings, only to end up in the grip of another ultimately
poisonous clan. If there is a villain here besides Edie's father
(James Naughton), the part goes to Warhol (Pearce). After making Edie
the "superstar" of his controversial movies, he jealously guilt-trips
her over her involvement with the rock star. He is an unlikely Oedipal
figure for Sedgwick, whose suspicions toward happy-family facades are
explained in all-too-familiar melodramatic fashion.
Pearce, one of the most versatile of screen actors, is compelling and
witty as the pallid Svengali, for whom society gossip seeps into even
Catholic confession. His anxious, hungry gaze conveys envy, self-
loathing and a childlike fascination with beauty. As the beauty who
for a while captivated him beyond all others, Miller delivers a
powerful performance, often baring all to give us Edie at her most
candlelit exquisite as well as her most degraded. From the throaty
laugh and old-money inflections to the extreme vulnerability,
neediness and intelligence, she brings to life Sedgwick's legendary
allure.
Supporting performances are a mixed bag, ranging from the awkward (a
decidedly unflamboyant Jimmy Fallon as a "flamboyant socialite," Mena
Suvari as rich girl Richie and Illeana Douglas as Diana Vreeland) to
the convincing (Armin Amiri as fellow Factory girl Ondine, Beth Grant
as Andy's mother and Edward Herrmann as the Sedgwick family attorney).
Screenwriter Captain Mauzner, who co-scripted the John Holmes-centered
"Wonderland," indulges in too much explanatory psychologizing. But
stripped of that overlay, his screenplay often sizzles with the self-
conscious humor of smart nonconformists. DP Michael Grady ably helps
Hickenlooper pay homage to Warhol's inventively bad-is-good filmmaking
and renowned B&W screen tests. Playing '60s New York, Shreveport, La.,
lends a fitting vintage feel, while the production design by Jeremy
Reed and John Dunn's costumes create an exuberant blend of high
society and underground scene.
Factory Girl
Bob Yari Prods.
Credits:
Producer: Holly Wiersma
Producer: Bob Yari
Producer: Richard Golub
Producer: Malcolm Petal
Producer: Kimberly C. Anderson
Producer: Morris Bart
Director: George Hickenlooper
Screen Writer: Captain Mauzner
Cast:
Actor: Sienna Miller
Actor: Guy Pearce
Actor: Hayden Christensen
Actor: Jimmy Fallon
MPAA rating: R
Running time: 87
katorzejames
"Factory Girl" loses its way as bio and pic.
By Kevin Crust, Times Staff Writer
A brisk, superficial treatment of the tragic supernova life of Edie
Sedgwick, "Factory Girl" disappoints as both biography and drama. The
film charts the "poor little rich girl's" trajectory as decidedly
downward from Cambridge art student to Andy Warhol's disposable model/
actress/muse and finally to institutionalized drug addict. As a hopped-
up ramble through the Pop Art '60s, it's more like "That Girl" on
speed than anything else.
Directed by George Hickenlooper from a screenplay by the improbably
named Captain Mauzner (story credited to Simon Monjack & Aaron Richard
Golub and Mauzner), the movie never gets beyond a psychosexual
portrayal of Sedgwick as victim. Fans well-schooled in the lore of
Warhol in general and all things Edie in particular will come away
with no deeper understanding of the principals while newcomers will
wonder what the fuss was all about in the first place.
ADVERTISEMENT
Sienna Miller stars as the doomed young woman, a debutante from an old
New England family who was born in Santa Barbara and raised on a vast
horse ranch. She ditches Radcliffe for the siren call of Manhattan
with her heart set on a Holly Golightly existence. No sooner does she
meets the enigmatic Warhol (played by Guy Pearce) than she's down the
veritable rabbit hole, seduced and consumed by the scene centered on
the artist's infamous Factory.
The film depicts the Factory as high school with more flamboyant
clothes and hair and stronger drugs. Petty jealousies and backbiting
create a toxic environment in which the hangers-on vie for Warhol's
attention and bask in his reflected brilliance. Sedgwick's immediate
ascendance to virtual prom queen portends her equally rapid fall from
grace.
Edie and Andy become inseparable, morphing into one thin, platinum-
haired being. They're symbolized as outsiders who briefly share the
white-hot spotlight, the swan offering her beauty to the ugly duckling
who returns the favor by bestowing upon her capital-C cool.
Unfortunately, the film never convincingly establishes why they are
drawn to one another or meaningfully gets into the ways their mutual
needs created a yin-yang synchronicity.
"Factory Girl" really goes astray with the arrival of Billy Quinn
(Hayden Christensen), a Bob Dylan-esque rock star set up to be the
anti-Andy. Like Pearce, Christensen throws himself into his role, but
both are crushed by the sheer iconographic weight of their characters.
Warhol and Dylan are too huge to be used as support beams in such a
slight film.
The story is structured as a faux romantic struggle between "Dylan"
and Warhol for Sedgwick's aesthetic soul, with the options seemingly
limited to an opportunist or a vampire. But the real battle for Edie
was lost long before in a family that sent its children to a
psychiatric facility the way another might have sent them to finishing
school.
Warhol, with his Madison Avenue background, excelled at throwing the
banal back in the faces of the Establishment and making them like it.
Here, the filmmakers take that once subversive notion and reduce it to
a public service announcement.
Hickenlooper uses a framing device with scenes of Miller as Sedgwick
being interviewed by a therapist, a contrivance that serves little
purpose other than to set out and then reiterate the film's themes and
provide exposition. The film heavy-handedly drives home its simplistic
interpretation of Edie as the abused and abandoned target of a series
of childish, manipulative men, with the ultimate blame saved for her
family.
Duke
> interpretation of Edie as the abused and abandoned target of a series
> of childish, manipulative men, with the ultimate blame saved for her
> family.
How Anna Nicole of her.