I don’t pretend to have a clue how to adapt William Faulkner’s “As I Lay Dying” for the screen, but unlike James Franco, I, at least, didn’t try.
Franco co-writes, directs and stars in an unfortunate attempt to mimic Faulkner’s trademark surreal Southern Gothic that’s as rough as a shot of moonshine but carries all the punch of Diet Sprite. He plays the son of a Deep South matriarch whose husband (Tim Blake Nelson) and other children haul her homemade coffin across the county to her final burial ground, with various characters taking turns narrating the group’s travails.
The story could be read as an extremely black comedy about white-trash yokels unable to get anything right — one son suffers a broken leg that gradually becomes gangrenous — or as a parable of harsh punishment being meted out on the sin-stained South. But as Franco dilutes the drama with first-year-film-student gimmicks, like split screens and slow motion, it just seems like a dull collection of pointless monologues from actors who can’t even be bothered to match up their accents. Franco is a dilettante, and it shows.