Portrait d'une muse

One senses that Edie Sedgwick deserves better than this. It's not that Sienna Miller doesn't throw herself into the role but the screenplay - a conglomeration of truth, half-truth, and fiction - lacks depth and the direction is just as shallow. Factory Girl hints at a greater tragedy than the one it presents. By adhering to surface details and never letting the audience get to know the title character, the movie comes across as a generic bio-pic about another lost girl of the 1960s whose 15 minutes of fame leads to a downward spiral. However Sienna Miller is good and if there's any reason to see this film its for her performance.

Better than I had expected. Is the story a bit aimless? Yes. Does it randomly introduce/evict characters for the sole reason that they were parts of Edie's life? Yes. Is it just an hour and forty minutes of Edie going to fabulous parties, meeting fabulous people and slowly declining into a complete wreck of drugs and poverty? Very much so. But I felt that the film did an accurate job of depicting Edie's life, since all that happened were parties, socializing and a terrible downfall. I mean her brother and widow have stated that it's an accurate portrayal, so I don't see how one could disagree. That being said, the film is clearly just a device to propel Sienna Miller's extraordinary performance. Her transformation into Edie Sedgwick is the most precise and utterly flawless portrayal of a real life person I've ever seen. It's quite easily the second best performance of last year (the first being Hard Candy's Ellen Page) and one of the top five female performances of all time. Guy Pearce is also quite fantastic, and Hayden Christensen was much better than I expected him to be. Overall, the film is nothing special. It's not necessarily bad, but it surely isn't great. It's all about Sienna.

Not the best biopic I've seen recently (actually saw it on DVD last night). I have read "Edie" by Jean Stein about a million times, so I could figure out a lot about what was wrong in the movie. I also thought the use of the musician character was quite amusing, simply because he was supposed to be a portrayal of Bob Dylan, and from what I have read, Bob Dylan barely even remembers Edie Sedgwick.

Another goof I caught in the movie was when Edie was listing all the popular drugs at the Factory, was that Adderall was mentioned. This drug did not come out until 1996. I was rather surprised it was mentioned, because if they had been on methylphenidate at the time, Ritalin was probably their drug of choice. It was available at the time. I myself have been on Adderall (for ADHD) for a very brief period in the 90s, and it was really horrible...I can't possibly imagine anyone wanting to be on that thing.

In the 90s I knew a guy who had been Warhol's room mate in the 1950s and a very, very minor character in Andy's later life, I asked him once if he ever knew Edie, and he just groaned and said, "she was the MOST BORING girl I ever met in my life." End of discussion.

It's not a documentary.

Just in case you read some of the rather hysterical comments and garner the impression that it's supposed to be about real people, it's not. Andy Warhol was never a real person, just a performance.

Guy Pearce presents Andy Warhol as the superficial creature he undoubtedly was. The original art-as-business creator, the very God at whose altar such modern day charlatans as Damien Hirst worship. Pearce's performance is riveting, his Andy Warhol is as empty as his crapulous art; just a two-dimensional diagram of someone who leaves no shadow. A cartoon.

Sienna Miller's performance as Edie Sedgewick is the best thing she's ever done. Caught in the strobe lights of Warhol's strangely sterile world of non-sexual sex and sofas still in their plastic wrappers, Edie becomes the focus of his short attention span for a while. She flashes across the screen like a speeded up Holly Golighty, while Warhol's voyeuristic viewfinder traps her in it's leering stare. The camera loves her and so does Warhol. But we know it's going to end in tears.

Nothing in the movie has much depth, none of the characters are developed beyond what we already know about them and the whole sixties New York scene is represented by a series of iconic "things". The Chelsea Hotel, the Velvet Underground, a soundtrack of songs that sound right but which actually don't fit at all. For instance, "Leavin' here" by The Birds, a British group in which Ronnie Wood was the guitarist, was recorded in 1966 but was never released in America. However, there it is on the soundtrack being played in the factory sometime in 1965.

But no matter.

The movie pretty much captures the shallow, transient and utterly facile world of Warhol in the sixties and in another way it sums up the emptiness and tragedy of the Hollywood dream machine too. But it doesn't ask any deep questions nor does it pretend to be something it's not. It's entertaining and worth watching for two very good performances by Guy Pearce and Sienna Miller.

It's not art, it's just a movie, albeit a superficial one.

I knew a lot about Edie Sedgwick before seeing the film and was even prepared for inaccuracies but the major problem with this film is that it is inaccurate not for the purpose of making a point but that it is inaccurate for the purpose of making a one-dimensional film.

Did Hickenlooper paint Edie as a perpetual victim (notice how throughout the film she is never injecting herself but is bent over while others inject her?) just so that he could show her as a victim of Andy Warhol and his drug fiend factory friends? Or that she was always a victim of people like her friend Chuck who did a complete turn on her for that villain Andy? Is Hickenlooper trying to say that the biggest mistake of Edie's life was not choosing Dylan over Warhol in that elevator scene where her future self voices over, "that was the biggest mistake of my life"? Edie Sedgwick came to the factory a sick person, she was already headed for a crash even before she set eyes on Andy Warhol. In reality, she was rejected by the factory friends and many others for the drugs she brought with her everywhere, she was not introduced to them at the factory as the movie shows.

Hickenlooper seems to me to be trying to say that Edie Sedgwick, that fresh faced wasp in knee socks and pearls who left Cambridge with sketches tucked under her arms could have potentially had a wonderful and peaceful life, even a stable marriage with Bob Dylan had she only not met Andy Warhol and been subject of those movies.

I have a problem with this film because I am so interested, most people are, in the real Edie Sedgwick and I agree with another poster who suggested you see Ciao!Manhattan to get a better sense of who she was. If you want a tragic love-story about a good girl who chose the wrong guy, watch Factory Girl.

The real Edie Sedgwick was a person whose hystrionics and drugs were symptoms of a soul that was always trying to fly away, for her the world was always too small and her pain was always too big, and she lived her life as though she dreamed of having her wings singed flying too close to the sun.