"Not marble, nor the gilded monuments\nOf princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme;\nBut you shall shine more bright in these contents\nThan unswept stone besmear'd with sluttish time."
So wrote Shakespeare in his Sonnet 55, praising as much poetry's longevity as the endurance of the beloved. In George Hickenlooper's Factory Girl, a surface-skimming jaunt through the life of Warhol muse Edie Sedgwick (Sienna Miller); the artist is cast as jealous, exploitative lover to his lady gamine. As one character opines: "You see, the artist steals the girl's stories, makes a fortune, and the girl doesn't get anything."
The film deliberates about the hazards of artistic culture (having evolved from patron-sponsored to consumer-oriented) and the injurious triangle between Ms. Sedgwick, Andy Warhol (Guy Pearce), and folk singer "Billy Quinn" (Hayden Christensen). With his downy pompadour, harmonica, and nasal baritone, Quinn is a not-so-subtle, but badly realized reference to Bob Dylan—who has since threatened to sue the filmmakers for linking his personage to Ms. Sedgwick's eventual demise.
This squabble, along with Hickenlooper's articulate rant about modern art, plays out amid the DVD extras. However, these materials do little to clarify the lady Edie, nor does the extra ten minutes of film justify the DVD's provocative subtitle.
Indeed, Factory Girl falters under its own agenda, which are as numerous as they are varied. Optimists may call this impressionism, but the end result is the same—we know little about Ms. Sedgwick beyond her punctuated brow and exaggerated earrings. This is all the more unfortunate since Ms. Miller, herself an "It" girl, delivers moments that elevate Sedgwick to complexity appropriate to any human life. Edie, as the movie sputters to suggest, was light in its duality—intelligence and luminosity. Hopefully, Hickenlooper's flawed biopic will serve as momentum for less ego-driven future projects on Ms. Sedgwick.
Movie: C+\nExtras: C
