July 2008
At the Movies
Factory Girl
US-Rated: R
German release date: August 7
Television “superstars” with the shelf-lives of fruit flies continue to prove that Andy Warhol’s conception of fame has long outlived its early ironic considerations.
Factory Girl traces the rise and fall of the first ephemeral
“superstar,” Edie Sedgwick, who was created by Warhol himself. The film is structured around a 1970 therapy session in Santa Barbara—where Sedgwick died of a barbiturate overdose a year later at the age of 28. From there,
Factory Girl flashes back to Edie’s (Sienna Miller) departure from art school in Boston, and to her superficial and glittery days as part of the Warhol circle in New York City. Warhol (Guy Pearce) is portrayed as a pop art giant and emotional vampire, who used Sedgwick as a vicarious mirror and dropped her when her avid drug use became troublesome. The “other man” in the sordid tale is singer Bob Dylan. (Although Dylan has officially rejected the movie’s treatment of his love affair with Sedgwick.) Hayden Christensen eerily captures the musician, whose rejection of the former hipster diva pushed her further into the darkness of drug abuse. Ultimately, however,
Factory Girl more than acknowledges Edie Sedgwick’s own part in her downward spiral, thereby giving a chillingly accurate depiction about the wages of insubstantial fame.
The Nanny Diaries
US-Rated: PG-13
German release date: August 14
Annie Braddock (Scarlett Johansson) is a New Jersey-born anthropology student hired as a nanny by a rich Manhattan family. In
The Nanny Diaries/i>, she reveals that the true difficulty of her work is not just dealing with the family’s spoiled son Grayer (Nicholas Reese Art). Coping with his solipsistic, workaholic parents—known only as Mr. and Mrs. X (Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney)—is the true challenge. The Xs encourage Grayer to read the financial press; he eats a diet consisting almost entirely of soy products; and, of course, the germ-ridden subway is forbidden territory. All of these oddities Annie observes and evaluates as if the Xs were residents of a primitive island culture. Indeed, one of the movie’s masterstrokes shows Annie beginning to see the family as figures in various dioramas, frozen in their ritualized and counterproductive attempts to nurture their child. Such biting social satire is the joint creation of the talented writer-director team of Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, whose 2003 film American Splendor presented a convincing and quirky portrait of the comic-book writer Harvey Pekar. Their latest project intelligently and entertainingly studies social anxieties, and how class warfare plays out in a supposedly egalitarian society. <<<
