As I Lay Dying

I'm not going to waste everyone's time debating whether or not this film should have been made. It's been made.First of all, this was so much better than I expected. On paper, some of the casting decisions look atrocious, but no one turns in a bad performance. Franco, as Darl, is (unsurprisingly) unable to explore Darl's mind the way Faulkner did in the original novel, and much of the "who" and the "why" of the character is left for the viewer to interpret. Of course, the novel itself relied heavily on the interpretation of the reader, so I'm not going to be too hard on Franco for that. As for the actors that looked terrible on paper...well, for me, they were Danny McBride as Vernon Tull and Logan Marshall-Green as Jewel. The latter, I have to say, BLEW ME AWAY. I can honestly say he stole the show for me. In the novel, my favorite character was always Darl, but Marshall-Green's performance had me focusing more on Jewel throughout the course of the film. Interestingly, Franco frames Jewel like a saint in some of the film's more beautiful camerawork, leading me to wonder whether the director saw Jewel as more of a protagonist than I did. Now, to McBride. What, you say? Danny McBride in a role like this? Favoritism on Franco's part, perhaps? These were the things I thought before seeing the film. Fortunately, it doesn't matter either way, because Vernon Tull's character is significantly downplayed in the film, and his wife Cora is cut out almost entirely. Still, McBride doesn't do anything he shouldn't, and while I still can't say I understand the casting, there isn't really enough for his character to do for me to judge his performance.Also, Tim Blake Nelson. If you only see this film for one reason, let it be Tim Blake Nelson. His immersion into the character of Anse, patriarch of the Bundren family is complete; he manages to walk that rare line where if he'd have hammed it up a bit more, it would have been caricature, and if he'd have downplayed it just a tad, the character would have been ineffectual. As he is, Nelson nails the character. His accent, hampered by the character's abominable dentistry, is suitably garbled, and the truth of his words suitably ambiguous.For the sake of completion, Ahna O'Reilly, Jim Parrack, and Brady Permenter were spot-on as Dewey Dell, Cash, and the intriguing Vardaman, respectively, but seriously. Tim Blake Nelson.Now, on to the film itself. Franco attempts to bring Faulkner's kaleidoscopic narrative to film with the use of split screens, and I can't say I can think of a better way. However, his use of this technique varies from inspired to meaningless to confused. The chief issue I had was when two versions of the same event were presented side by side (a fantastic idea) but one of them was quite obviously not from anyone's point of view. I would have appreciated seeing these scenes through the eyes of two different characters, but instead I get X's view, and then another extraneous camera angle. It's like watching a deleted scene (I can almost hear Franco saying, "We COULD have shot it this way...). At other times, though, the technique works brilliantly, as when we see Dewey Dell hearing Darl's words, yet we see that Darl's lips are not moving. Is Darl actually saying anything? Is Dewey Dell reading his body language? Or could they have a telepathic connection? This is the kind of scene that justifies bringing the book to film.Many will be pleased that the story survives in pretty much its complete form. In many cases the characters are speaking right out the book. Speaking of which, I'm sure you've noticed how hearing dialogue straight from a book can sound very fake and affected? Surprisingly, I didn't feel that way while watching this one. The actors become their characters to such an extent that words belong to the characters, not to Faulkner and his novel. Unfortunately, towards the end, the story becomes incredibly confusing to anyone who hasn't read the book. This is mostly due to Franco's inability to show what's going on in Darl's head. In the book, there is enough there for readers to form all sorts of interpretations about what happens. In the film, Franco hasn't given us enough of Darl to allow for complete understanding of the event itself, let alone interpretations as to the motivations behind it.Overall, I was very pleased that the film was not atrocious (which I was expecting) and overjoyed that it turned out to be a very good film. While it may not accomplish anything that the book did not, it gives the characters a face. Tim Blake Nelson turns in an outstanding performance as Anse Bundren, Logan Marshall-Green is just as good as Jewel, and we even get a surprisingly nuanced sequence pertaining to Vardaman that lends the film a sense of sympathy the book did not possess. All in all, it is certainly a worthwhile experience. Here's the but: read the book first. Not only because the book is always better (in this case, it's one of the greatest literary achievements of all time), but because knowledge of the book is necessary for an understanding of the ending, and for a deeper understanding of the characters and story as a whole (Darl especially). See it, people! Complaining about the vile, satanic Franco and his unending blasphemous attacks on the bronzed giants of literature just serves to cement popular opinion about the literary establishment being an old men's club. Read some Stephen King and shut up.

First, I give James Franco and his backers a huge amount of credit for doing this movie. It's nice to see an actor with an interest in American literature and I believe that Faulkner was the greatest American writer of the 20th century. When I heard Franco wanted to bring As I Lay Dying to the screen I was fascinated but I also did not see how he would translate the book to film. With that said, I think he did about as good a job as possible. I also have a feeling that he was working with a limited budget. Perhaps a longer, more detailed script would have resulted in a better movie. It looks as if the movie was filmed in Mississippi. I thought the actors were a little too pretty (plus a little too old) and to be honest I thought Franco was wrong for the Darl character. (Darl was a little different and he did capture that on screen.) The actor playing Jewel did a great job. It certainly seemed to me that all the actors were trying to make it work. Blake's portrayal of Anse did not work for me. Some of the split screen work was interesting. I always thought the central character of the book was Addie and I understand that it would be difficult to make her central in the film. The genius of the book (to me) is that Faulkner portrays these simple hill people as human beings. (1930 New Yorkers would dismiss the Bundrens as a bunch of monkeys.) They were backward and unsophisticated people but Faulkner does not mock them, there is dignity in them. Yes, most had their selfish reasons for the trip to Jefferson but they're like all of us, flawed human beings. Flawed human beings on a journey through high water and hell. I enjoyed the movie because I love Faulkner. This movie is not for everyone. Thanks Jame Franco. Thanks for thinking about an audience that would appreciate a tip of the hat to the old master, William C Faulkner.

James Franco's As I Lay Dying inevitably differs from Faulkner's. In the novel, the Bundren home and farm lie on a hill, hard to reach, where Doc Peabody has to be hauled up by a rope. Cash limps from an earlier fall, but his leg at the end is not amputated. Jewel is a whole head taller than the others. An important section in the novel, Darl being transported to Jackson by train, is left out of the film. Except for Anse's and perhaps Jewel's, the faces in the movie belong too much to our time and not the `twenties in Mississippi. Some of the clothing is too contemporary as well. In the film, Dewey Dell is too much a girl of our own day, more a woman, and much too beautiful. The landscape is too unvaried; the novel moves from Mississippi hill country toward (without actually entering into) the delta. Such variations could be expanded. But they do not matter. If you want to read Faulkner, read him. Franco's movie is not a substitute for that nor does it mean to be. It is a work of translation. I think one has to see the film in and for itself, though I do not know how someone who has not read the novel might respond to it. In a sense, it is a work of the grandest plagiarism, since so much of the language is Faulkner's, shifted about, cut hugely, altered, and, at times, even changed, beginning as the novelist's language and then becoming Franco's. Toward the end of the movie, Darl speaks words that are found in the novel in Addie's monologue. But the film requires its own place and dress and faces. What I have just noted, and the differences could proliferate, does not matter because the movie is a different sort of experience, bound to a different sort of watchfulness. For example, the scene of the crossing of the flooded river, though in detail not Faulkner's scene, is brilliant, moving, astonishing to see. So, too, is the whole sequence when Darl sets fire to Gillespie's barn. Addie was extraordinary, her look, her speech, her placement in the frame. The language of the book is often powerfully visualized. In that translation, too, the novel is turned into film, albeit a different, and distinct, work of art. If Faulkner's novel has an ontological depth the film lacks, so be it. Faulkner was obsessed with a religious sense of the person in the absence of any belief he could muster in God or anything like a god. Darl's anguish is, to make use of another fancy word, existential. (There is no mention in the movie of his having fought in France, an intriguing omission.) Darl confronts the world in his and its absence. He is words, words, words as Jewel is deeds, doing, action, impulse. I will not go on. Faulkner remains an artist of an historical moment when the fundamental, the oldest questions remained not only worth asking, but demanding to be asked. Perhaps that is still so for some. I'd like to think so, but the film seems to be more bound to a sense of an absurd fatality, the journey itself therefore intensified because of the way it ends, in disaster. The end in the novel is disastrous, too, but only for some, not for all. Cash is changed, after all, and his new complexity is not nothing. The sensibilities of novel and film, therefore, are different. One might say they adhere to different beliefs, to different ways of seeing the world, views that often intersect, as in translation, but which cannot be the same. The two works, book and film, the two artists, Faulkner and Franco, exist, through Franco's intervention, in a dialogue with one another. This is the essence of translation, its necessary, inevitable transpositions. Franco's use of the split screen cannot give a sense of interiority of Faulkner's monologues, of course, but it can offer instead the doubleness, even better the plurality of perspective that is the film's obsession, even to the moment (wonderful) when the muddy river itself is twice seen. This "doubling" is necessarily more restrictive than Faulkner's use of multiple narrations. Film in some ways is always more limited, imaginatively limited, than literature. That is, it is so if it is seen as a substitute art. Bresson, of course, would have none of that. Theater was one thing; "cinematography," by which he meant a film, is another. The split screen, then, eliminates over and over again the possibility of a single and therefore stable vision. It is this instability that strikes me as part of Franco's vision. Look at how much time he spends on people's looking, just looking or staring and, occasionally, seeing. No one sees what anyone else sees. That is Faulknerian enough, of course. Narrative in Faulkner is almost always at least doubly bound. But we are often, in his As I Lay Dying, always, within a character. It is a matter of plurality rather than of doubling. In the movie, not even in the voiceovers, are you in them, in the characters. The split screen is distancing. You are always outside, listening in, as the language spoken combines and clashes with what is seen. It is a wholly different way of viewing the world, in short. What is fine about the film for me, then, is how much of Faulkner's "poetry" remains within it even though it is transposed. Faulkner's novel might be in part about the anguish of meaning; Franco's is more about its impossibility. That is much too glibly said. But I hope it might intimate some of what I see. The movie is undoubtedly the finest translation of a Faulkner novel to film. The few others are worthless or ludicrous. Franco's film on Hart Crance, The Broken Tower, may be the best movie ever made about a poet. His As I Lay Dying, seen for itself, in its subtle greens and browns and yellows, in its recurrently stunning and provocative vision, is one of the best re-imaginings of a novel into film. It is also one of the few genuinely serious movies directed by an American that I have seen during the last few years, as original and accomplished as Kelly Reichardt's work, for example.

This could have been an utter classic, but for the awful soundtrack? The actors, especially Pa Budren, nail the `Redneck' Mississippian drawl to perfection, unfortunately, to decipher what they're saying most of the time is an absolute nightmare and has a ruinous effect on the film. Sometimes authenticity needs to be diluted?Thankfully I had read the book - a `Deep South' classic. These stories are not easy to accept for the usual cinema goer - appearing unexciting and odd! They do however make an amusing read, but you'll have to take my word for it, having said that, it's not the point is it! Having read the book, I understood the film perfectly well, and so I thoroughly enjoyed it, I really did, but as I said, this wouldn't be for everyone, even if the soundtrack was crystal clear? This is very much an art-house film because of its background.The cinematography is brilliant and is `HD' quality to look at. It cannot be faulted. The acting I have to say is quite superb, especially Tim Blake Nelson, as old man Bundren - Anse. In fact they are all excellent. My only other gripe is the `river' scene, which in the book is a raging torrent; it's a real highlight of the tale. Here the river never looks worse than a babbling brook - it's somewhat undercooked!If you've read the book then I think that you'll really enjoy this, as it's true to the script, and so, is easy to follow, even though the soundtrack is so irritatingly hard to grasp!I totally fail to understand, how a film can cost millions to make, and fail on the simple concept that if the audience can't decipher the dialogue, then they can't follow the story and understand and enjoy the film to its maximum?Do you remember the re-make of `True Grit?' Well, this suffers from the same deficiency. As one reviewer has already stated - sub titles is possibly the answer and if I watch this film again then that is what I'll use!This film was very good in a lot of ways - it's a real shame that it missed its calling!

Une seule étoile car contrairement au descriptif aucun doublage français n'est présent sur les DVD et Blu-ray. A éviter si vous n'êtes pas fan des VOST.

Wer Faulkner's Geschichten kennt und liebt wird den Film mögen. Die Verfilmung galt als unmöglich. Das Team blieb dennoch nah ans Buch und konnte die unterschiedlichen Figuren sehr gut darstellen und herausarbeiten.Die Geschichte spielt in den 20ziger Jahren in Mississippi. Anse der nur auf sich selbst bezogene Patriarch bringt die Leiche seiner Frau mit seinen Kindern auf dem Maultierwagen zum Begräbnis nach Jefferson, Er selbst braucht neue Zähne........

Famielentragödie mit guter Wiederspiegelung der Zeit, Problematik der Zeit und der Menschen gut wiedergegeben. Gute Darsteller, hat mich leider nicht ganz so richtig begeistert. Schade.