As I Lay Dying - film review

Let no one accuse James Franco of lacking ambition: the actor/author/artist/musician/filmmaker has directed three feature films in 2013 alone. This is the best, if only because it aims the highest: there’s surely a reason no one has previously taken on William Faulkner’s 1930 novel about a bereaved Mississippi clan, a landmark of US literature that resists capture with its 15 narrators and stream-of-consciousness prose. Still, Franco makes a reasonable fist of it: this earnest adaptation is good-looking and fairly acted, and its failure to tame this material isn’t for want of trying.

Franco himself plays Darl, the most articulate (and mentally unstable) child of five in the dirt-poor Bundren family, united on an arduous trek to transport their dead mother’s corpse to her hometown for burial. Tim Blake Nelson, seemingly channelling The Simpsons’ bucktoothed hick Cletis Spuckler, plays abusive patriarch Anse, who variously maims, betrays and steals from his children along the way. It’s queasy stuff, not made any less so by Franco’s decision to convey Faulkner’s multiple perspectives with a dizzying combination of split screens and hand-held camerawork — an idea that, much like the novel, probably worked better on paper.