As I Laying Dying

As I Lay Dying, an experimental William Faulkner adaptation helmed by actor and cultural dilettante James Franco, is composed almost entirely in split screen. Bucking convention, the split screens are only rarely used to merge two spatially disconnected scenes. Instead, more often than not, both halves of the frame depict the same scene from different angles. Sometimes one half shows a character’s face and the other that character’s point of view; at other moments, the split screen is used to show different takes of the same shot. The two halves don’t always cut at the same time, which means that a scene might keep going on the right side of the screen while the next one starts on the left.

The effect, which attempts to create a visual analogue to Faulkner’s famously un-filmable prose, is fascinating. Whether it’s ultimately meaningful, however, is a different question. In the movie’s design, Faulkner’s novel functions chiefly as a source of imagery and atmosphere; a good chunk of the dialogue is unintelligible (it’s doubtful that even viewers raised in the Deep South will be able to understand more than a third of what Tim Blake Nelson says), which creates the impression that the characters are as textural as the swaying trees in the background. Taken individually, the halves of the split screen frame are unremarkable: plain-looking, pragmatic handheld shots with odd slow zoom thrown in. (This becomes especially obvious in the final 15 minutes, when the movie abandons the split-screen layout.)

The core of As I Lay Dying lies not in the juxtaposition of any two shots, but in the line down the middle of the screen, which separates them; the bifurcated effect is more important than the actual content of the images. Familiarity with Faulkner’s novel (or at least with his work) makes it easier to appreciate what Franco is going for. He’s not trying to adapt As I Lay Dying so much as simulate—not always successfully—the experience of reading the book. Like Franco’s other directorial efforts, it ends up coming across as an academic art object, somewhere halfway between a graduate thesis and a video installation—interesting, but only in context.—Ignatiy Vishnevetsy

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Filming Faulkner’s Modernism: James Franco’s “As I Lay Dying”
By Joseph Entin

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NOVEMBER 13, 2013

PERHAPS NO ONE in contemporary American cinema is as serious about exploring the literary possibilities of film as James Franco. In 2010, Franco, who is not only an actor and filmmaker, but also the author of a collection of short stories and a PhD student in English, starred in Howl, directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, a film that includes a complete reading of Allen Ginsberg’s sprawling mid-century poem. In 2011, for his MFA thesis project in the film program at New York University, Franco directed and starred in The Broken Tower, a Hart Crane biopic, which featured voice-over readings of several Crane poems. Now, in his most ambitious undertaking yet, Franco directs and co-stars in As I Lay Dying, a feature-length adaptation (from a screenplay by Franco and Matt Rager) of William Faulkner’s dense and decentered 1930 novel about a family of dirt-poor Mississippi farmers, the Bundrens, who undertake a multi-day journey by wagon to bury the family matriarch, Addie (played by Beth Grant), in her hometown. As readers of the novel know, the family’s odyssey takes a series of calamitous, even absurd, turns. On the first day, the wagon spills into a flooded river and the coffin slips down stream; Cash (Jim Parrack), the eldest Bundren sibling, breaks his leg and to stabilize it, his brother Darl (Franco) encases it in cement, which leads to gangrene. In order to pay for a new mule team, and then a set of false teeth, Addie’s manipulative husband Anse (Tim Blake Nelson) pilfers money from his children and sells his son Jewel’s (Logan Marshall-Green) beloved horse. Sister Dewey Dell (Ahna O’Reilly), pregnant and seeking an abortion, is taken advantage of by a young pharmacist in the city, and Darl, after setting fire to the barn where the coffin is resting one night, is apprehended and sent to a mental asylum. Through it all, the youngest Bundren sibling (Brady Permenter), grapples with the meaning of his mother’s death through the symbolic significance of a large fish he catches and cleans. (The novel’s shortest and perhaps most well-known chapter is a single, imagistic sentence from Vardaman: “My mother is a fish.” )
Faulkner’s famously fragmented novel is composed of 59 first-person chapters, written in the voices of fifteen different characters. Translating such a polyglossic text to the screen poses some daunting challenges, which may explain why Franco is the first director to make the attempt. In Faulkner’s novel, form and content converge: the disjointed narrative structure, which lacks a presiding narrator, manifests the isolation that defines the characters’ lives, which are marked by hidden secrets and unspoken desires. In an effort to convey the splintered, often opaque quality of the novel’s writing, Franco employs several unconventional techniques, including hand-held camera work, split screen compositions, and rapid cutting between simultaneously occurring events.

At times, these devices work effectively, such as when the Bundrens’ wagon and the coffin splash into the river on the first day of their journey. Here, the divided screens convey the watery struggle through the eyes of different characters, enhancing the sense of confusion and chaos. In several of the film’s most compelling moments, Franco offers refreshingly direct access to Faulkner’s monologues, such as Cash’s 13-point explanation of the coffin design or Dewey Dell’s sensuous description of her love affair in the cotton fields, which are delivered in tightly-framed shots of the characters looking unswervingly into the lens. The unconventional filmic techniques may rankle some viewers, but set against the provocative and perplexing nature of Faulkner’s prose, they arguably don’t go far enough. The novel is not only about isolation, which the film emphasizes, but also about the way isolation, and fundamental questions of subjectivity and perception, are structured by language. As just one example, Vardaman sneaks into the barn after learning of his mother’s death, and sees Jewel’s horse, “as though the dark were resolving him out of his integrity, into an unrelated scattering of components — snuffings and stampings, smells of cooling flesh and ammoniac hair; an illusion of a coordinated whole of splotched hide and strong bones within which, detached and secret and familiar, an is different from my is.” To grapple with such passages, the novel — itself a “scattering of components,” “an illusion of a coordinated whole” — insists that we slow down, read and re-read. The expectations of narrative clarity that drive a major motion picture, in which the progress of the plot ultimately takes priority over innovations in cinematic form, make the medium an uneasy fit for Faulkner’s novel, the content of which is so often manifested in the very texture of the writing.

In addition to using experimental techniques to echo the novel’s fractured structure, the film also strives valiantly to do justice to two other dimensions of Faulkner’s text. The first is the mythic significance of the Bundrens’ story. The ambition of Faulkner’s story can be gauged in part by his attempt to lend an epic quality to the struggles of ordinary, even debased, people — uncivilized, inarticulate “folk,” as they might have been considered by middle-class, metropolitan readers in the early 1930s. Both through the poetic power and linguistic complexity of the monologues, which undercut any assumptions that the characters are simple-minded, and through the archetypal nature of the family’s journey, which passes through fire and water in an epic cycle, the novel elevates the Bundrens and their struggles. They become, as Darl notes in one of his monologues in the novel, “figures in a Greek frieze, isolated out of all reality.” Even more than the novel, the film stresses the mythic potential of the trip, using slow-motion camera work and swelling, discordant string music to underscore the symbolic valence, for instance, of the scene when the coffin spills into the rushing river as the brothers try to ford a river where the bridge has been washed out. In one of the few substantial alterations to the novel, this fairly early scene becomes the occasion for Addie’s lyrical, if brutal meditation — delivered with steely intensity by Grant — on the poverty of words, which Addie famously refers to as “shapes to fill a lack.” To his credit, Franco realizes that Addie’s stress on the gap between words and deeds, and her blistering critique of “love” as an empty signifier, are at the heart of the novel’s commentary on the modern condition, and this section of the film is particularly well-fashioned and memorable, although for viewers less familiar with the original text, the full significance of Addie’s monologue may be hard to absorb.

While the film emphasizes the transcendental potential of the Bundrens’ journey, it also underscores the material immediacy of the story with crunching, realist detail and visceral force. In particular, the deteriorating condition of Cash’s broken, bleeding leg, which doesn’t receive medical attention until the only remedy is a gruesomely-rendered amputation, is excruciating to watch, and gives physical form to the layers of psychic pain suffered by the Bundren clan as a whole. Like many modernist narratives, this is a story of disintegration and decay — a tale of a family’s, and an historic era’s, collapse. In As I Lay Dying, death and burial, trial by water and fire, are not followed by birth, but by rape and abortion. While the epic resonance of the Bundren’s quest lends the poor farmers an unlikely dignity, neither the novel nor the film sanctifies the family members, who are self-absorbed, desperate, and often manipulative (“God’s will be done,” Anse intones immediately after Addie’s death, “Now I can get me them [false] teeth”). Modernism has been described as the advent of “grim reading,” and Franco’s film doesn’t shy away from the bleak nature of Faulkner’s tale. The film is largely absent of the black humor that punctuates Faulkner’s novel, but like the book, it ends abruptly, leaving viewers little solace.

As I Lay Dying is one of Faulkner’s most formally daring works, but it is also one of his most socially and politically engaged novels. As Faulkner biographer Joseph Blotner explains, Faulkner started writing the book the day after the Wall Street collapse in October 1929, and completed it in a short, two-month burst. As such, it can arguably be considered America’s first novel of the Great Depression. While there’s no indication that Franco intended the film to be a political work of art, it comes five years into the deepest economic recession since the 1930s. Seen in context of the current era’s mortgage foreclosures, declining wages, and financial suffering, Franco’s adaptation of Faulkner’s novel about the plight of an impoverished family isolated and stymied by economic hardship and social obstacles reminds us that high-minded works of art — even a period piece like this one — can also speak to contemporary historical concerns.

The film certainly has its weaknesses. Perhaps preoccupied by his directorial demands, Franco’s performance as Darl comes across as unfocused and flat, and the character’s descent into madness is inadequately developed. Some viewers may be frustrated by the slow pacing, the experimental techniques, or the absence of definitive answers about the characters’ internal motives. More significant, the film does not (and perhaps cannot) fully render the wondrously expansive poetic and philosophical complexity of Faulkner’s novel. The film is ideally suited to viewers who have not only read the original text, but are also familiar enough with it to appreciate the challenge of transposing the text’s modernist forms into filmic ones. This is a limited audience, of course, and one that, ironically, will understand what gets lost in the process of translation from book to screen. Yet Franco’s As I Lay Dying is an earnest attempt to use the visual power of cinema to convey the pain and pathos of the Bundrens’ condition, and to gesture to the demanding nature of Faulkner’s story-telling style. While there are limitations to how deeply the film reflects the profoundly searching nature of Faulkner’s modernism, the making of it is no minor undertaking, and the final product is a commendable and provocative project.—Joseph Entin

William Faulkner's novel “As I Lay Dying,” published in 1930, is about a family hauling the dead body of one of its members on a journey of several days over rough terrain in a mule-drawn cart. That might be one definition of a fool’s errand, the primary fool being Anse Bundren, a stubborn, suspicious and toothless Mississippi farmer who insists on burying his wife, Addie, in her hometown. Another definition might be the attempt to turn Faulkner’s splintered, lyrical book into a movie. In this case the fool would be James Franco, who directed and stars in the first film adaptation of a book that has long been considered unfilmable.

But in rushing in where wise men might fear to tread, Mr. Franco has accomplished something serious and worthwhile. His “As I Lay Dying” is certainly ambitious, but it is also admirably modest. The script, written by Mr. Franco with Matt Rager, tries to pare Faulkner’s multivoiced narrative to a manageable essence. The book is a series of fragmented monologues spoken by Addie, her friends and kin and people her burial party encounters on its journey. (The shortest chapter is a single sentence, uttered by Anse and Addie’s youngest son, Vardaman: “My mother is a fish.” ) Some of these are pared away, some shoehorned into dialogue, and others rendered in voice-over. The frequent use of a split screen — sometimes effective, sometimes distracting — emphasizes the isolation of the characters, even as they are connected by blood, duty and desire.

Attending Addie’s coffin on its trip across flooded rivers and along dusty rural roads are her husband and four children, three of whom are also his. In addition to Vardaman (Brady Permenter), there is Cash (Jim Parrack), a skilled carpenter who built the coffin; Darl (Mr. Franco), who is sensitive perhaps to the point of mental illness; Dewey Dell (Ahna O’Reilly), secretly pregnant; and Jewel (Logan Marshall-Green), the offspring of Addie’s affair with the local preacher. All of them are assembled in the service of Anse’s determination to honor his wife’s wishes about her final resting place.

Anse may have motives that are less spiritual and more selfish. In any case, he is a complicated fellow, an odd blend of ridiculousness and nobility, played by Tim Blake Nelson with sharp eyes and a slack jaw. Mr. Nelson has the most strenuous job of acting, since Anse is the biggest talker in the family, but it is Beth Grant as Addie, a dead woman staring straight into the camera and speaking her mind, who registers the strongest impression. Ms. O’Reilly is anxious and watchful, while Mr. Parrack captures Cash’s stoicism and Mr. Marshall-Green, Jewel’s hotheadedness. Mr. Franco, as the most inwardly troubled and alert of the siblings, coasts a little on the assumed sympathy of the audience. Either that or his movie-star magnetism gets in the way of his efforts and diffidence, but at any rate his Darl is blurrier than the rest.

As a whole, though, “As I Lay Dying” conveys some of Faulkner’s themes, and the details of the Bundren family story, with clarity and concision. All the children pay a terrible price as they obey their father and honor their mother, and their composite story is a catalog of material and moral losses. A foot, a horse, freedom, dignity and innocence are among the sacrifices. And while the Bundrens are poor country people, there is something almost Greek about their fates, as if they were a House of Atreus transplanted to a cabin in the Yoknapatawpha backwoods.

Mr. Franco does not quite gather the full force of their tragedy, but he at least makes you aware of it. His tour, as actor and filmmaker, through some of the thickets of 20th-century American history — he has recently tackled Allen Ginsberg, Hart Crane and Cormac McCarthy in addition to Faulkner — has been worth following, not least because he makes his enthusiasm for these writers contagious.—A. O. Scott

To borrow a line from Joel and Ethan Coen's seminal slacker classic, The Big Lebowski, James Franco "draws a lotta water in this town." 1 And this town isn't just Tinseltown. Indeed, Franco has been cutting a swath across the country from Los Angeles to New York to New Haven. Not content with just being a talented actor, Franco has spent the last few years trying to fashion himself into an arts and humanities polymath: a mash-up of John Cassavetes, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Will Oldham, Bret Easton Ellis, and Harold Bloom. As I write this, Franco is likely entering another field, and not tentatively.

It's this ambition that warrants respect when watching Franco's first foray into adapting the work of America's most notoriously unadaptable writer, William Faulkner. Unfortunately, this same ambition is what makes Franco's As I Lay Dying another installment in a series of unsatisfying films based on Faulkner's experimental fiction.2 From 1933's The Story of Temple Drake, based on the seedy potboiler Sanctuary, to 1959's The Sound and the Fury (starring Yul Brynner, of all people, as the sadistic Jason Compson), big screen adaptations of Faulkner's modernist novels have failed to approximate what makes these books great: the language that layers detail upon idiom upon idea upon history, building up a story like paint on a canvas or a mansion torn violently from the earth. Faulkner's best works are three-dimensional objects, while the films adapted from these novels are, without exception, flat.3

Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is the story of the poor, rural Bundren family's disastrous journey to bury the body of their matriarch in Jefferson, the closest thing to an urban center in the author's fictional Yoknapatawpha County. Readers inhabit the thoughts of fifteen different narrators spread over fifty-nine chapters, experiencing how each family member (including the dead mother herself) views and is viewed by kin and community. Addie Bundren's body is both nearly lost in a river and consumed in a fire deliberately set by her own son, Darl; two of her other boys, Cash and Jewel, are almost killed trying to complete the voyage; her daughter, Dewey Dell, uses the trek as a chance to get into town to try to have an abortion; and Addie's husband, Anse, pushes his broken family onward while doing as little of the heavy lifting as possible. With a structure as simultaneously fragmented and unified as the Bundren family itself, As I Lay Dying is Faulkner's most experimental page-turner.

Actors Logan Marshall-Green, Tim Blake Nelson, Danny McBride, and James Franco in an excerpt from Franco's adaptation of As I Lay Dying. In this clip the Bundren men try to balance their need for income with their obligation to honor Addie's burial wishes.

One of the biggest problems with Franco's take on the Bundren family's quest to bury their mother's body is Franco's presence in it. Darl Bundren is Faulkner's most barely embodied character. This is what makes the novel's scene in which Darl burns down a good Samaritan's barn sheltering Addie's body for the night so surreal. Up to this point in the novel, Darl is a voice, a mouth that drinks, and a set of "parts" that cool wind blows across in the night (11).4 He is a cubist painting of a man, a collection of pieces, echoing his description of his mother's coffin up on sawhorses as being "like a cubistic bug" (219). While we know that earlier he goes with Jewel to get a load of wood that "means three dollars" (17, 19), we never see Faulkner's Darl working, a fact that links him with his shiftless and shady father, Anse, and that separates him from his mother who whips her schoolchildren, and his siblings who we actually witness toiling. Franco's Darl is Franco's body, a man's body, big, fit, and good looking. It's a body many men would like to walk around in, but it keeps Darl grounded in a story that he should be floating over, through, and finally inside "the womb of time . . . the hard girdle in which lie the outraged entrails of events" (121).

James Franco as Darl Bundren, 2013. Photograph by Alissa Whelan. © RabbitBandini Productions. James Franco as Darl Bundren, 2013. Photograph by Alissa Whelan.© RabbitBandini Productions. Franco isn't Darl's only problem, though since the actor also directed and co-wrote (with Matt Rager) the project, I suppose that's not entirely true. Some key details and scenes from the novel that establish Darl as an even madder philosopher than The Sound and the Fury's Quentin Compson are curiously omitted from the film. The most glaring absence is any hint that Darl's ability to narrate scenes for which he's not present might have something to do with his time "in France at the war" (244). In fact, his breakdown on the train to Jackson, which is "further away than crazy" (252), is not depicted, and it would be very easy to come away from the film thinking that Darl is simply arrested, not committed. The implication of Darl's shellshock that comes late in the novel is crucial in forcing us to take a backward glance at the entire miserable story of the family's journey. Faulkner's Darl is akin to J.D. Salinger's Seymour Glass, a man who has seen too much to simply let things go on as they are. Without this background, the madness Franco tries to inject into Darl's arrest at Addie's gravesite feels tacked on, and the film misses a chance to reflect our current concerns about PTSD and the burden born by America's poor in our most recent wars.

This is not the only omission that impedes our thicker understanding of the characters in the film. The novel's built-up mystery surrounding how Jewel got his beloved horse, which Darl frequently refers to as Jewel's "mother," is reduced to a single line in the film simply explaining that he worked for it. While we understand that this means something given the Bundrens' poverty, without really seeing all that the horse cost him (sleepless nights, Addie's grief, his siblings' extra labor to pick up Jewel's slack), the moment when he leaves the family and gives the horse to Flem Snopes to complete the deal Anse made behind Jewel's back for a new team of mules to haul the wagon is simply one of a boy begrudgingly fulfilling an obligation, not an almost erotically-charged profession of his love for his mother. This lack of context diminishes the tension between Anse and Jewel, who is not actually his son, but rather the product of an affair Addie had with the local minister. Jewel is a rather minor character in Franco's As I Lay Dying, but this is true of all of the characters, in spite of the fact that some of the actors (particularly Jim Parrack as Cash, and Ahna O'Reilly as Dewey Dell) give outstanding performances.

Actress Ahna O'Reilly as Dewey Dell Bundren, 2013. Photograph by Alissa Whelan. © RabbitBandini Productions. Actress Ahna O'Reilly as Dewey Dell Bundren, 2013. Photograph by Alissa Whelan. © RabbitBandini Productions. Because the film focuses more on the journey to bury Addie's rotting corpse than the inner lives of the characters, it fails to emphasize what's most important in the novel: the violence the Bundrens do to each other for reasons both innocent and evil. An absent scene that helps cement the latter motivation is when Anse basically steals the money Dewey Dell has brought with her to try and get an abortion in Jefferson. In the novel, this is the moment of Dewey Dell's final abjection, and it sets up the shocking ending where we realize that Anse has used his family's labor and capital as a way of securing himself a second life, complete with a new "Mrs. Bundren" and a set of teeth purchased with the money taken from his used up (and soon to be shamed) daughter. The film's scene of Anse smiling his new smile would have been a gut shot had we previously seen him extorting Dewey Dell just after her rape at the hands of the druggist who promised that violation would cure what ailed her. Without knowing how Anse paid to be able to eat "God's own victuals" (37), we're left thinking him wily and maybe a little goofy, not a hillcountry Machiavelli.

Even the story of the disastrous journey is incomplete in Franco's film. Following the barn burning scene in the novel, the Bundrens approach Jefferson worse for wear: Cash's leg is decaying in its concrete cast, Addie's coffin has holes drilled through the lid and into her face because of her youngest son's curiosity, and Jewel's back is burned after rescuing Addie's box from the fire. On the road into town, the wagon passes "three negroes" and "a white man" (229). The "negroes" balk at the stench coming from the wagon, and upon hearing their comment, Jewel utters his grammatically incorrect invective, "Son of a bitches" (229). However, he says this as the wagon passes "the white man," who pulls a knife on Jewel and demands an apology, which he gets, but only after Darl makes it clear that Jewel doesn't fear the man (229). As Candace Waid points out in her study, The Signifying Eye: Seeing Faulkner's Art, this is the only direct reference to race in the entire novel, and its coupling with Jewel's burned and blackened back, as well as his assertion that "the white man" looks down on them "because he's a goddamn town fellow" (230), is a powerful instance of the "coloring of class" (71), a theme Faulkner explores more explicitly in Light in August, Absalom, Absalom!, and his Snopes Trilogy.5

The fact that the coloring of class is a preoccupation of Faulkner's later novels is not enough of a reason to fault Franco for not including this road scene in this adaptation. However, within As I Lay Dying this scene reminds us that the Bundrens' place outside the bounds of respectability (another of Faulkner's oft-explored themes) is intimately tied up with their barely landed agrarianism in the face of a South becoming more and more a social geography of "town folk." The film depicts this divide by showing the disgust the people in town experience as the smell coming from the wagon wafts through the square. The novel does this as well, but by combining it with the scene on the road, Faulkner's As I Lay Dying makes it clear that the antagonism is more fundamental. It's about who the Bundrens are and what they will never be, not what they've got in the wagon.

In this scene from Martin Ritt's The Sound and the Fury, Yul Brynner's Jason Compson berates Joanne Woodward's Quentin after her night out. The scene exemplifies how the film plays Faulkner's text as a straight melodrama, stripping the main characters of the internal monologues that give them complexity, and denying us Faulkner's unique ability to critique his own characters (and the ideas and estates they represent) simply by letting them talk to us. Brynner's Jason is particularly altered, as his characterization lacks any of the hyperbolic and comedic sense of victimization that makes his sadistic personality in the novel almost understandable.

Franco's next take on Faulkner is an already half-filmed adaptation of The Sound and the Fury, an even more difficult text to render into the language of film without losing all the texture that Faulkner's prose provides. Just ask Yul Brynner. Still, the fact that Franco is looking to take on these projects is encouraging, as it provides an opportunity for someone to do with Faulkner on celluloid what has only been attempted on stage thus far. The theater troupe the Elevator Repair Service has staged a dramatic reading of the first section, "April Seventh, 1928," of The Sound and the Fury that mirrors the experimentalism of the novel by engaging in multivocal ventriloquism, with actors moving between parts that aren't really parts at all because they all come from within the mind of the mentally handicapped Benjy. While Franco likely won't (and probably shouldn't) try to simply mimic this on screen, here's to hoping that he embraces the fullness of Faulkner's modernism, creating the kind of layered film Faulkner never would have been able to write during his days haunting the Warner Brothers back lot.—Daniel Pecchenino

James Franco’s adaptation of William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying employs split-screen heavily to approximate the effect of the novel’s 15-odd contradicting, stylistically varying points of view. The method announces a certain modesty in relation to the canonical source. “Approximate” is the key word: the split-screens focus on the notion of multiple perspectives but only occasionally present points-of-view that are genuinely distinct. One half might show a medium shot, and the other a long shot from the same view; or one half will feature a nature cutaway while the other stares into a face. The film’s dependence on the split screen is anti-commercial and jarring enough to put off the completely uninitiated, but considering the novel’s difficulty, it’s a passable sidestep around the question of “unfilmability.” Some hesitant direct addresses to camera and the film’s sparse voiceover hint at the disaster that might have resulted had Franco been more aggressive about aping literary techniques through cinematic means.

But this As I Lay Dying is not a disaster, the faint praise an acknowledgment of the folly that unspooled in some minds when word first spread that the unusually prolific celebrity multi-hyphenate was going to attempt to render Faulkner. That the earnest result is a qualified, perfectly respectable success shouldn’t be a big surprise considering Franco’s seriousness, at least in the realm of literature. He has earned a master’s, published a short story collection to some acclaim, and made a student film on the subject of poet Hart Crane which, though reducing the life to a series of brooding photogenic poses, showed flashes of brash creativity and enthusiastic engagement with the subject. This is not the giggling irritant Franco of his Oscar-hosting and inept film criticism, but one with humility who (as he put it) wants to do right by Faulkner. The obvious downside to this careful avoidance of feather-ruffling is a drab adequacy that keeps the film from being more than serviceable.

As I Lay Dying James Franco Jim Parrack

Franco and college friend Matt Rager’s screenplay motors through the particulars of the novel’s mock-epic plot, making elisions and smartly trimming characters for coherence and time, and lifts most of its dialogue verbatim. Addie Bundren (instantly recognizable character actress Beth Grant) is the dying mother whose wish to be buried in the town of Jefferson is obeyed and enforced by husband Anse (Tim Blake Nelson), who demands his whole family make the journey with the homemade coffin in their wagon. Like the others, Anse has ulterior motives for wanting to make the trip. In his case, it’s partly to replace the gawping void in his mouth with new false teeth. Daughter Dewey Dell (Ahna O’Reilly) is revealed to be seeking some sort of abortion pill, after having been impregnated by a farmhand with whom she was secretly sleeping. Jewel (Logan Marshall-Green) is the quiet angry one who might not be Anse’s son. Danny McBride appears briefly and humorlessly as neighbor Vernon Tull, perhaps just to get the funny star’s name on the poster.

The whiff of vanity project, or caprice, that, for all its virtues and sincerity, still clings to the film would have been more ignorable had the director not cast himself as the most prominent character, brother Darl Bundren, to whose perspective we’re most often privy. Franco must have been too wrapped up in directing to think of anything interesting to do with Darl, who comes across as a void. Franco’s ample screen time includes only a few noticeable moments—he’s great reacting disgustedly to his father whining about having to forsake false teeth for so long. When Darl erupts in an outburst of babbling vitriol towards the end, it’s supposed to be a cathartic release of accrued frustration, and anger at Bundren hypocrisies, but Franco’s florid emoting is only confusing since he never planted the seeds. It signifies nothing. (The Sound and the Fury is reportedly due next for Franco adaptation, by the way.)

James Franco Jim Parrack

The HD photography by Christina Voros (who also shot the director’s The Broken Tower, Interior. Leather Bar. and Child of God) likewise contributes to keeping emotions stifled during the big scenes, maybe unintentionally. The sunny, flat lighting of Darl’s breakdown gives Franco nowhere to hide, and the modernity of the image’s crispness works in opposition to the sensitivity to time and setting evident in the costumes, props, location scouting, etc. Franco clearly enjoys the challenges offered by period pieces — much of the energy in The Broken Tower (the Hart Crane biopic) is expended upon masking signifiers of the modern world via tricky upward camera angles and blurred shallow focus. Here, in the could-be-Yoknapatawpha County wilderness, Voros’s camera is free to snatch plenty of handsome, mood-setting filler of swaying wheat, splashing mud, and mocking vultures. When these asides are accompanied by bits of voiceover Faulkner —“My father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time” or “I would think of the sin as garments which we would remove in order to shape and coerce the terrible blood”— you can feel the film grasping for a Malickian, in-the-gutter-looking-at-the-stars grandeur. Tim O’Keefe’s score, mostly doom-laden ambient scrapes and minor key guitar repetitions, complements the grey-brown-green imagery, but allows only a few avenues of entry for Faulkner’s comedic undercurrents.

Comedy is one piece of collateral damage risked lost when adapting a difficult novel like As I Lay Dying, and Franco loses most of it, but he deserves credit for the movie’s sustained dread, sense of inevitable tragedy and the simpatico anxiety of most of the performances. The split-screen tactic skews and simplifies, but still creatively simulates, on a reduced scale, the multiple perspectives of the book. Without the luxury of a novel’s ideally author-determined pace and length, Franco’s version, unsexily, performs admirably within its self-limited parameters.—Justin Stewart

DMU Timestamp: August 05, 2016 15:53