Plot Details: This opinion reveals major details about the movie's plot.

Films about despicable characters can be executed successfully. Scorcese's The Departed, for example: Jack Nicholson's Costello reeks of evil, but he's so clever and well, sexy, that he illuminates the screen -- even though we want him to eventually die, we enjoy the ride to his death.

George Hickenlooper's Factory Girl is not executed successfully. You hate the protagonists and villains from the onset. Because of Captain Mauzner's dreadfully sentimental script, they don't have anything worthy to say. We can't even witness Edie Sedgwick's (Sienna Miller) transformation from clean, fun girl to heroined-out vagrant -- she's simply disgusting from when we first meet her.

Sedgwick, as many of you might realize, was one of avant-garde artist Andy Warhol's (Guy Pearce) favorite subjects in the 1960s. When Warhol was making movies-for-the-sake-of-movies in his Factory, he was frequently filming Sedgwick, whom he found very alluring. Warhol is generally remembered as one of the 60s' most compelling figures, but here is he instantly antagonized as a man who only focuses on image and neglects all of his colleagues after a given amount of time. But Hickenlooper can't convince us of Warhol's evil because Warhol never does anything visibly wrong -- he talks, he eats, and he shits. For some reason, the director comes to blame him for Sedgwick's downfall.

But we don't care about that because Sedgwick clearly instructs her own demise. She's choosing to be pumped with narcotics, she's choosing to be filmed by Warhol, she's choosing to act aggravatingly unctuous and cutesy in order to acquire fame. There's never a moment where we can sympathize with her -- toward the end, a childhood friend shows her a picture of her "clean" self and says, "Do you remember that girl?" Sedgwick we doesn't, and neither do we, because we were never shown her.

When the credits roll, Hickenlooper makes the confoundingly stupid choice of showing real people who knew Sedgwick commenting on her spirit. But we fast-forward past all of this, because Factory Girl has provided no incentive to watch.

Rating: D

Recommended: No

Viewing Format: DVD