Liberty Bell
e pluribus unum
- Joined
- Apr 27, 2006
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New Yorker Review
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/cinema/articles/070219crci_cinema_denby
by DAVID DENBY
Issue of 2007-02-19
Posted 2007-02-12
Edie Sedgwick, the leggy sixties heiress who became a Vogue “youthquaker” and Warhol superstar, and died of an overdose at twenty-eight, has inspired a kind of whirling, pocket bio-pic, “Factory Girl,” in which the heroine (Sienna Miller) burns brightly and then snuffs herself out. It’s a peculiar movie, frantic and useless, with a hyperactive camera that gives us no more than fleeting impressions of Edie ecstatic at parties, Edie strung out on drugs, Edie lying mostly naked on a bed, with her skin splotchy from injections. Whatever shrewdness or charm Sedgwick possessed that caused people to believe that she was a revolutionary figure in New York night life, it doesn’t come through in this movie, though Sienna Miller, who laughs, fidgets, and acts up a storm of desperate anxiety, tries hard to bring the girl to life. The busy but inexpressive screenplay by Captain Mauzner—George Hickenlooper directed—starts off with Edie as an excitable, shallow ingénue at art school and launches her into Manhattan, where, in 1965, she has an epochal meeting with Andy Warhol (Guy Pearce) at a party. She’s awed by the Pop artist-manufacturer, and Warhol, in need of a new superstar for his movies, is impressed by her beauty and classy provenance (the Sedgwicks of New England went way back, whereas the Warhol crew had arrived the day before from Pittsburgh and the Bronx). The actual Edie was a stick, not much more substantial than Twiggy (though sexier), with haunted, kohl-shadowed peepers and a hanging lower lip that made her look like a frightened animal. Miller is more beautiful than Sedgwick but less memorable—a pretty girl who is expertly made up to look seedy and exhausted.
Big, crazy parties were the quintessential New York event in the sixties, just as real-estate closings are now, and, at times, life in the Factory was an endless, desultory bash. Hickenlooper gets the atmosphere of apocalyptic listlessness right—the silver-foil walls, the overstuffed thrift-shop furniture, the people sitting around, some naked, some shooting up, with Warhol making himself available for an instant to anyone outrageous enough to grab his attention. David Bowie played Warhol in “Basquiat,” and Jared Harris did it in “I Shot Andy Warhol,” but, for whatever it’s worth, Guy Pearce is the best Andy yet. He’s taller and stronger than Warhol, but he has the appropriate interior slump, the ineffable malign vagueness, the oddly mesmerizing voice that turns every statement into a question. What’s hard to understand is how this torpid fellow could possibly have produced the numerous paintings, silk screens, and other art that got made in the Factory (the actual Warhol was ambitious and calculating and, in this period, hugely industrious). “Factory Girl” does, however, re-create the insolent slovenliness of the group’s moviemaking operation—Warhol idly turning on the camera as Edie squirms uncomfortably on a bed with some handsome boy, or as members of the Warhol gang have lewd encounters with a horse. The Warhol movies never attempted to represent anything; they recorded whatever a camera in the Factory could take in—for the most part, limp burlesques of Hollywood genres and star poses. When the actors became famous, the joke was complete.
The movies made at the Factory erased the distinction between artist and voyeur, creator and hanger-on. Parasitism that would have seemed sad anywhere else blossomed into flamboyant celebrity. Where did Edie fit in? This movie records what she got from Warhol—star status in the art world and appearances in Vogue and the gossip columns—but not what he got from her. According to the oral testimony gathered by Jean Stein (and edited with George Plimpton) in “Edie: American Girl,” first published in 1982 and still the best book on the scene, she introduced him to wealthy and socially prominent people he wouldn’t have approached on his own. The actual Edie, who knew how to draw on the prerogatives of the rich—i.e., how to shop with overdrawn credit—was a more sophisticated and dominating presence than the lost girl in the movie, who seems almost entirely a victim of Warhol’s flickering interests (when he no longer needs her, he discards her). At the beginning of the movie, she announces that she’s going to die young, and Mauzner and Hickenlooper never allow us, even for a second, to imagine that anything else could have happened to her. “Factory Girl” comes off as a piece of sensationalist fatalism: the spectacle of dying is meant to be its appeal. We’re left with the impression that the movie got made because Edie Sedgwick is still just barely notorious enough to be exploited one more time.
http://www.newyorker.com/critics/cinema/articles/070219crci_cinema_denby
by DAVID DENBY
Issue of 2007-02-19
Posted 2007-02-12
Edie Sedgwick, the leggy sixties heiress who became a Vogue “youthquaker” and Warhol superstar, and died of an overdose at twenty-eight, has inspired a kind of whirling, pocket bio-pic, “Factory Girl,” in which the heroine (Sienna Miller) burns brightly and then snuffs herself out. It’s a peculiar movie, frantic and useless, with a hyperactive camera that gives us no more than fleeting impressions of Edie ecstatic at parties, Edie strung out on drugs, Edie lying mostly naked on a bed, with her skin splotchy from injections. Whatever shrewdness or charm Sedgwick possessed that caused people to believe that she was a revolutionary figure in New York night life, it doesn’t come through in this movie, though Sienna Miller, who laughs, fidgets, and acts up a storm of desperate anxiety, tries hard to bring the girl to life. The busy but inexpressive screenplay by Captain Mauzner—George Hickenlooper directed—starts off with Edie as an excitable, shallow ingénue at art school and launches her into Manhattan, where, in 1965, she has an epochal meeting with Andy Warhol (Guy Pearce) at a party. She’s awed by the Pop artist-manufacturer, and Warhol, in need of a new superstar for his movies, is impressed by her beauty and classy provenance (the Sedgwicks of New England went way back, whereas the Warhol crew had arrived the day before from Pittsburgh and the Bronx). The actual Edie was a stick, not much more substantial than Twiggy (though sexier), with haunted, kohl-shadowed peepers and a hanging lower lip that made her look like a frightened animal. Miller is more beautiful than Sedgwick but less memorable—a pretty girl who is expertly made up to look seedy and exhausted.
Big, crazy parties were the quintessential New York event in the sixties, just as real-estate closings are now, and, at times, life in the Factory was an endless, desultory bash. Hickenlooper gets the atmosphere of apocalyptic listlessness right—the silver-foil walls, the overstuffed thrift-shop furniture, the people sitting around, some naked, some shooting up, with Warhol making himself available for an instant to anyone outrageous enough to grab his attention. David Bowie played Warhol in “Basquiat,” and Jared Harris did it in “I Shot Andy Warhol,” but, for whatever it’s worth, Guy Pearce is the best Andy yet. He’s taller and stronger than Warhol, but he has the appropriate interior slump, the ineffable malign vagueness, the oddly mesmerizing voice that turns every statement into a question. What’s hard to understand is how this torpid fellow could possibly have produced the numerous paintings, silk screens, and other art that got made in the Factory (the actual Warhol was ambitious and calculating and, in this period, hugely industrious). “Factory Girl” does, however, re-create the insolent slovenliness of the group’s moviemaking operation—Warhol idly turning on the camera as Edie squirms uncomfortably on a bed with some handsome boy, or as members of the Warhol gang have lewd encounters with a horse. The Warhol movies never attempted to represent anything; they recorded whatever a camera in the Factory could take in—for the most part, limp burlesques of Hollywood genres and star poses. When the actors became famous, the joke was complete.
The movies made at the Factory erased the distinction between artist and voyeur, creator and hanger-on. Parasitism that would have seemed sad anywhere else blossomed into flamboyant celebrity. Where did Edie fit in? This movie records what she got from Warhol—star status in the art world and appearances in Vogue and the gossip columns—but not what he got from her. According to the oral testimony gathered by Jean Stein (and edited with George Plimpton) in “Edie: American Girl,” first published in 1982 and still the best book on the scene, she introduced him to wealthy and socially prominent people he wouldn’t have approached on his own. The actual Edie, who knew how to draw on the prerogatives of the rich—i.e., how to shop with overdrawn credit—was a more sophisticated and dominating presence than the lost girl in the movie, who seems almost entirely a victim of Warhol’s flickering interests (when he no longer needs her, he discards her). At the beginning of the movie, she announces that she’s going to die young, and Mauzner and Hickenlooper never allow us, even for a second, to imagine that anything else could have happened to her. “Factory Girl” comes off as a piece of sensationalist fatalism: the spectacle of dying is meant to be its appeal. We’re left with the impression that the movie got made because Edie Sedgwick is still just barely notorious enough to be exploited one more time.
. Even if I disagree with him sometimes I still think he's brilliant.
I am glad you noticed that too babydoll,I thought I was just being crazy jealous.I think you must be right because I've never seen Sienna's face look that way!!!!!
