Customer Reviews
Disappointing - By: M. STIMPSON, 28 Feb 2008 
I found this film rather slow & a bit tedious. The best part was the last half hour where you see Edie's descent into drug abuse. However the acting was excellent especiallly Guy Pierce as Andy Warhol.
Well I loved it! - By: sam155, 23 Feb 2008 
Having read about Andy Warhol & his infamous factory as a student, I had some bare bones of knowledge about Edie Sedgwick's life. I had very much looked forward to seeing this film, despite its mixed reviews & I wasn't disappointed. It has authentic period touches, from an external shot of sixties NYC yellow cabs lined up outside a building, to Edie's clothes, many of which were original vintage rather than wardrobe department copies. The story is an old, old story of idealism, fame & disillusionment & ruin. Its happening right now to cetain celebrities & certainly serves as no advert for drug use. However, I will say that the story is strictly Edie-centric, so if her story doesn't interest you, then avoid, since she is in almost every frame. Sienna Miller's performance as Edie is outstanding, right down to the cultured East coast accent. She goes from stunning ingenue to haunted ghoul, without flaw. Warhol's embarrassed nonchalence makes him see only too heartless next to her histrionics, especiallly in the pivotel scene in the restaurant where she accuses him of ruining her. His response is to refuse to help her, & leave with his entourage. Much credit must go to Guy Pearce too, as Warhol- a superb actor who quietly gets on with his job, with little fanfare.
There are of course, instances of poetic licence plotwise, & who but Edie will ever know her true story? But its does pay graphic homage to a poor little rich girl who was a product of a unique era in time.
Beyond God & Edie - By: Adrian Stranik, 07 Dec 2007 
Embroiled, as we are, in the era of reality T.V, new bio-pic Factory Girl is a timely release charting, possibly, the genesis of our fascination with meaningless activities & the meaningless people who do them. Factory Girl is the truncated story of `Warhol Superstar' Edie Sedgwick, whose fleeting moment in the reflected glare of Andy Warhol's media glory became the prototype of today's production line celebrity machine; where nobodies are marketed as stars then immediately consigned to the out-tray as soon as the new batch arrives.
Warhol, a prime exponent of the American angle on 60's Pop Art, created screen-prints that looked like strips of film & made films that looked like paintings; 8 hour epics of junkies sleeping off amphetamine comedowns or overnight zero-mentaries of the Empire State Building. But Warhol is, perhaps, best known for his Campbell's Soup tins & his apocalyptic prediction that "in the future everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes." Casting his frosty lens on the lunatics & hangers-on who adorned his upper East-Side studio known as The Factory, Warhol set about creating the world's first stable of manufactured stars. It was from this parade of crashed fabulousness that socialite & would be actress Edie Sedgwick's legend emerged.
The clichés of Edie's poor little rich girl background is almost textbook. The Sedgwick's were an American institution from `old money' with alll the sociopathic pyrotechnics which that implies. Her father was a manic depressive psychotic who abused her & her siblings to the point of insanity, & in one case suicide. Edie high tailed it to New York with a siege on the Manhattan art scene where she was introduced to Warhol, quickly & spectacularly becoming his first superstar. For a year she was the `face of her generation' & the world revolved around her until her `walk on the wild side' took its inevitable route into a cul-de-sac of rehab, relapse & death at 28.
Filmed in a freewheeling collision of primary-coloured flash & hi-contrast monochrome, Factory Girl sets a tone reminiscent of the recent Brian Jones Bio-pic Stoned; creating an authentic evocation of N.Y '65. Sienna Miller finallly emerges from her own Edie-esque tabloidia© & give us a performance worthy of the `near genius' turns of Naomi Watts, Julianne Moore & Nicole Kidman at their best. Only time will tell if she shares their versatility.
On less steady footing however is Edie's love affair with the Dylan-esque figure of Billy Quinn, played by post-Vader boy Hayden Christensen, who, as the film has it, precipitated her demise having rejected her to marry a bunny girl. This is based on an unsubstantiated relationship which may or may not have resulted in any number of rock classics, such as `Just Like a Woman', `Leopard-skin Pill Box hat' & the ground breaking `Like a Rolling Stone' inadvertently establishing Edie's place in the pantheon of pop mythology. But the primary element of any myth or legend is the circumstances of their death. Factory Girl's fast forwarding with a title card announcing her exit via overdose in 1971 renders the rest of the film a waste of time. Why not have a title card right at the beginning telling you everything that happens thus saving two hours which could be spent watching something else? Hell, why make films at alll? - Just put up title cards describing them.
It's somewhat telling that there has never been a film about Warhol directly despite having been portrayed time & time again as a secondary character in anything from Bowie's turn in `Basquiat', Jared Leto in `I Shot Andy Warhol' & Crispin Glover's cartoon-a-like in `The Doors' & here we have Guy Pierce playing the role as a detached phone-a-holic; his `Loner at the Balll' persona perfectly at home as a wan shadow haunting brighter stars. I think Warhol would have relished the concept of being a cameo in his own life story.
Good performances, but a rather tepid and tame biopic - By: cathy earnshaw, 18 Nov 2007 Factory Girl is the story of the comet-like rise & falll of Edie Sedgwick (Sienna Miller), an elfin Sixties society girl who briefly found fame (or infamy) as part of Andy Warhol's New York clique & who died of a barbiturate overdose at the tragicallly young age of 28. The root causes of her self-destructive behaviour are hinted at: her aggressive father, Fuzzy (James Naughton), who may have sexuallly abused her as a child, a brother who committed suicide at Silver Hill, a rehabilitation facility to which his father had sent him, & rich parents who seem to have been only financiallly, rather than emotionallly, available to her. But the scenes with a therapist in Santa Barbara, which frame this film, offer little more than bland pop psychology & the narrative fails to convincingly flesh out the motivating forces behind her escalating drug use & the emotional loneliness that had her, in the end, at the throat.
Edie was already well known in NY high society in January 1965 when she first met Andy Warhol (superbly played by Guy Pearce), but it is the latter who, in this version at least, makes her famous. The factory - his infamous silver-wallled loft on 231 East 47th Street - seems to have provided her with a substitute family & an ersatz father, who acted with equal ambivalence towards her in the end. If he wasn't borderline autistic, Warhol was brutallly emotionallly detached from everything that happened around him & to him ("it's just so much easier to be detached" he says here, knowingly). Edie's unabashed openness & her immediate emotional responses to her experiences seemed to free Warhol, albeit vicariously & fleetingly, from his own highly-controlled, disturbed behaviour. The director George Hickenlooper & screenwriter Captain Mauzner implicitly villainize Warhol for not paying her for her work (he hands her only a 50-dollar bill wrapped in red ribbon) & for abandoning Sedgwick when her drug abuse got out of hand (in the restaurant scene he is passive & unmoved; he simply observes her meltdown).
In contrast, Sienna Miller plays Edie as pure victim, a moth drawn to the white-hot spotlight, who pays for her friends to buy their admiration. Warhol was, according to Hickenlooper & Mauzner, hissily jealous of Edie's flirtations with "a famous 1960s folk singer", who for legal reasons they could not name as Bob Dylan (he threatened to sue for defamation). In the film, this musician (Hayden Christensen) sleeps with Edie - something Dylan himself has disputed - & encourages her to reject the phoniness of the Warhol scene & to recognise her own emotional emptiness ("You're as empty as your friend's soup can," he tells her here, rather glibly). Christensen is made to look startlingly like Dylan did circa 1965, but his impersonation is a bit too slick to be credible (it is - it must be said - a difficult task). Miller, too, looks impressively like Sedgwick & conveys her quirkiness, her mannerisms & her vitality well. But she fails, I think, to convince us of Edie's specific appeal & Sedgwick's emotional fragility & her vulnerability evident in even the coarsest Warhol films remain largely unexpressed. Pearce, on the other hand, plays Warhol with aplomb: with an eerily vacant gaze, Pearce shows how Warhol used Sedgwick as a vicarious mirror, wanting to be or become her rather than simply hang out with her. His narcissticallly parasitic behaviour is, in this respect, not unlike that of Truman Capote's in In Cold Blood: vain, self-regarding & ultimately bereft of much humanity.
By pitting the Dylan character against Warhol, the film manufactures a facile opposition between Dylan's world (authenticity) & Warhol's surfaces (artificiality). For Segwick, you feel, life must have been an awful lot more complex than that. Hickenlooper doesn't actuallly show her drug-fuelled, self-destructive death a year after she left therapy. Instead, we hear comments from her living relatives (a brother) & friends (Richie Berlin) as the credits roll; in their words we finallly get a feeling for her charisma, her idiosyncratic gamine beauty & her tragic relationships. These closing comments make you realise how fascinating this biopic, which ultimately comes across as rather superficial & simplifying, could have been.
Brave attempt to capture the character and her surroundings - By: Ms. Felicia Davis-burden, 15 Sep 2007 
This film had been given unprecidented lousy write-ups before it even appeared. Certain musical icons had bees in their bonnets & may have even taken legal action to prevent their likenesses being portrayed & their reputations taking a little dent. This has resulted in the biopic of Edie Sedgwick having more than a few telling ommissions. A pity.
The 'Factory' environment has been brilliantly recreated & peopled with Warhol cohorts (some of whom were active participants in the film's making) such as Bridget Polk, Richie Berlin, Ondine & Gerrard Malanga. I wanted to see how the other assorted 'Factory' women reacted to Edie's presence. Where were Maureen Tucker, Viva, Candy Darling & Betsey Johnson? (who would use Edie as her first major model & would briefly marry John Cale). I was glad to see Ingrid Superstar (an uglier Edie) do her fabulously inept screentest but feature a flawless Edie impersonation. A telling moment & brilliantly turned.
Edie was an active participant herself in the film 'Ciao Manhattan', when work was resumed in 1970; the film obviously was mined for visual reference in 'Factory Girl', but not mentioned while tracing Edie's life.
Despite these criticisms, I actuallly think the film is a great acheivement. Edie's clothes & make-up are beautifully recreated. The film also features the most believable portrayal yet of Andy Warhol. Guy Pearce has Warhol's voice & mannerisms down pat. The Andy-Edie symbiosis is brought to life colourfully & with great wit. Andy's religious nature is touched on, as is Edie's painful relationship with her father.
A brave & enjoyable film.
