The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, as the saying goes. Factory Girl proves how accurate that is. Director George Hickenlooper and writers Aaron Richard Golub and Captain Mauzner set out to dramatize the life of Edie Sedgwick in a way that would make us feel sorry for the tragic Warhol superstar. But Hickenlooper, Golub, and Mauzner eschew such trivialities as compelling screenwriting, deft character development, skillful direction, and steady editing in service to a resulting film so outrageously inane that it borders on being offensive.
Within the first five minutes of Factory Girl, we follow Edie (Sienna Miller), via voice-over narration (the crutch of the weak filmmaker), from a rehab clinic in California to an art school in New England to a New York City jaunt with "flamboyant playboy" Chuck Wein (Jimmy Fallon) to a hip art show where Edie meets Andy Warhol (Guy Pearce) to Warhol's silver-coated Factory, where Edie quickly ingratiates herself. We're never given a moment to process who we're watching, what they're doing, where they are, and why we should care.
Part of the problem is that everyone talks in catch phrases and taglines. I don't know if the screenwriters thought that making every conversation exist as a bite-sized self-righteous pontification about nothing translated into heady dialogue, but it simply doesn't work. Nor does the spastic direction and editing. We're never with a scene — or a character or an emotion or a place or a moment — for more than a couple of minutes. So quick is the editing here that it makes MTV in its prime seem downright geriatric.
Those first five minutes, with a steadier hand at the controls, should take much longer to get through. A better director would inform us more about who we're watching and why we should care. Hickenlooper thinks otherwise, that simply dumping everything and anything onto the screen as quickly as possible is enough for a compelling film. What he fails to realize is that cinema is a marathon, not a sprint, and just because he tells the Edie Sedgwick story in 90 minutes rather than 120 doesn't make him a master storyteller.
That failure results in a film where characters are never allowed to become three-dimensional. We're bombarded with how tragic Edie is even as she's living the high life as America's Next It Girl. But who cares? We're rushed through her Factory years so quickly that it's impossible to feel anything but shrugging indifference towards her. Not only does that make the ending of the film — Edie walking away from the camera, out of the California rehab clinic and into the warm glow of the California sun and security of an on-screen written epilogue (a sequence ripped, I'm sure, straight from a Lifetime Original Movie) — an utterly forced, wholly unearned conclusion, but it makes earlier scenes of Edie tripped out and used up almost laughable rather than tragic.
Article comments
1 - Vanessa
I liked it just fine. I don't understand why you have to find every damn flaw in it. Would you like it if someone tore apart your every move? What a career you've got.