“‘Jewel,’ I say. Back running, tunneled between the two sets of bobbing mule ears, the road vanishes beneath the wagon as though it were a ribbon and the back axle were a spool. ‘Do you know she is going to die, Jewel?’
It takes two people to make you, and one people to die. That’s how the world is going to end.”
-William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
So says Darl of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying. An established classic of modernist fiction, a famously unfilmable story told through chapters narrated from the varying perspectives of the book’s cast of characters, and dubiously claimed to have been written in six weeks. It’s sort of a big deal. And now James Franco has gone and made a movie about it. While the anti-intellectual press is busy turning their noses at James Franco’s higher education pretentions, I’m willing to give this one a chance.
Okay, sure, James Franco took some classes at Columbia and NYU, and then he became a doctoral candidate at Yale, big whoop, that doesn’t mean you can just throw your suspenders and straw hat on and go out to film the unfilmable, right? Well, obviously you can, whether or not it’s a success only time can tell. Either way, I imagine that Franco’s take on As I Lay Dying will be an interesting experiment. Even though I would argue that no film can claim to be an accurate translation of a text, it’s still an interesting practice that can be of value to a reader and movie-goer alike. That is barring that this doesn’t end up being a dusty costume melodrama (as the finale of the trailer leads me to believe).
Telling the story of a dirt-poor Mississippi family’s pilgrimage to bury their passed matriarch, As I Lay Dying is full of stark set pieces that take on biblical proportions on account of Faulkner’s framing text. Word on the street (the street is Cannes), is that Franco’s As I Lay Dying is heavy on the slow motion and voice over. I think that might capture the slow, visceral way that Faulkner’s scenery engenders itself to the reader, but I can’t help thinking that Franco’s technique will only lead to a mistranslation of an indelible American classic. Like Zach Snyder’s take on Watchmen (2009) proved to us, stylistic integrity is not the only aspect that defines a good adaptation. And when it comes to integrity to the source material it seems as though James Franco has also missed the mark. I’m specifically talking about that implied rape scene at the end of the trailer, if you haven’t read the book, spoiler alert: Ain’t not a mention of rape.
I’ll give Franco the benefit of the doubt. Maybe he’s trying to contextualize the realities of gender relations in the early 20th century. Sure, okay. But still, taking that kind of liberty with a book like As I Lay Dying just rubs me in the absolutely wrong way. It comes off as a bit exploitative of Faulkner and furthermore of America.
James Franco is taking a risk here, he is not going to make everybody happy, and I commend that. Early reviews from Cannes are mixed. From what I’ve heard, it sounds as though Franco has made heavy use of split-screen in order to capture how Faulkner’s characters reveal themselves through inner monologues and direct perceptions. That sounds to be in the spirit of what I would want from an As I Lay Dying adaptation as Faulkner gives us plenty of imagery for the visual mind.
What worries me is that Franco will miss the heart of William Faulkner’s story. A heart that resides as much between the lines as it does on the page. To point to a quote from Peter Bradshaw’s review from the Guardian,
“The problem, I think, comes with the way Franco directs himself in the role of Darl; his character’s motivations become slightly opaque…(speaking of the film’s climax) all that has come before does not appear to have accumulated in any climactic, tragic discharge of emotion or energy; it simply fades over the horizon.”
That’s the fear, you see. All style, no substance. A condition that has plagued the works of a lot of young directors. A young guy like James Franco runs the risk of missing the point or mistranslating that beating heart that resides at the center of Faulkner’s novel. And that is truly the most important thing communicated. Or to put it in a few words William Faulkner said when he accepted his Nobel Peace Prize in Literature:
“…the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself… He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion.” – William Faulkner (1950)
I think it should be clear that James Franco is taking an incredible risk with this production. Hopefully he’s learned something about the agonies of the human spirit. I’ll reserve judgment for now, and you can expect that I’ll have a lot more to say when it hits theatres later this year.
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