As I Lay Dying

William Faulkner is a notoriously tough writer to adapt into film. Until James Franco's adaptation of As I Lay Dying from last year, the only other one I can think of is The Reivers, which was Faulkner's most accessible novel and an outlier. Franco, who seems to be doing the work of two men, does an admirable job with the material, though it is by no means a great film.

The film does not start off well. The first thing to get used to is Franco's use of split-screens. This film had more split-screens than any film since Woodstock, I think. I'm sure this is in honor of Faulkner's approach, which was to feature many different narrators, but often the split-screen was on different takes of the same shot, or one half of the screen was black. I got used to it by the end, but it was tough sledding for a while.

The story is simple on its face. In Faulker's Mississippi around 1930, a woman is dying. Her kin are gathered around, waiting for her to go. Outside her window she can hear her oldest son Cash (Jim Parrack) building her coffin. After she dies, the father (Tim Blake Nelson) stubbornly insists on honoring her last wish to be buried in a town some miles away. The family, including Franco, son Jewel, daughter Dewey Dell, and youngest son Vardaman (surely named after the notoriously segregationist U.S. Senator) set off in a wagon along with the coffin.

Along the way they encounter obstacles, including flood and fire. Cash gets his leg broken, and their treatment of it is painfully unenlightened (they encase it in cement which sticks to his skin). Dewel Dell is secretly pregnant, and has $10 to spend on an abortion, if she can find someone to perform one. The father, Anse Brundren, has a mouth full of rotten teeth, and is looking forward to dentures. "God's will be done," he says, after his wife had dies. "Now maybe I get those teeth." The coffin begins to reek and attract vultures, and at times the clan looks like a bunch of rubes, even in deep Mississippi.

Franco is extremely loyal to the material, which maybe he shouldn't have been. He includes the interior monologues, which he likens in the extras to the confessions of reality show contestants. Never before, I expect, have reality shows and Faulkner been mixed. This gives the film a hallucinatory quality, but as the film went on I got interested more and more. The cinematography, by Christina Voros, increases this effect.

Franco, who is sometimes seen as a joke for his many projects, manages to pull something off here that is quite impressive.