"Factory Girl (Unrated)" (The Weinstein Company)
Meh. Guy Pearce's portrayal of Warhol as a total cad is fairly believable, but Hayden Christensen was the worst Bob Dylan impersonator I've ever witnessed. Sienna Miller's southern accent kept coming and leaving, sometimes in the same sentence. We watched the whole thing, but barely. A lot of mush-mouthed dialogue, so if that's your thing, you'll be well served to rent this film. Otherwise, wait for the book. Or something. Lifetime TV?
Shipped on 09/18/07.
Director George Hickenlooper's biographical drama charts the meteoric rise and subsequent fall from grace of Edie Sedgwick (Sienna Miller), an ambitious starlet who becomes the muse of Andy Warhol (Guy Pearce). Heading for New York City's bright lights after dropping out of college in 1965, Edie meets pop-culture icon Andy, who turns her into the toast of the town. But she soon discovers that glamour and fame have a price.
Update: Stephen Holden adds:
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
