As I Lay Dying

Directed by James Franco

(R)

**

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In adapting a novel that many considered unfilmable, James Franco “has accomplished something serious and worthwhile,” said A.O. Scott in The New York Times. The ambitious young actor-director doesn’t fully capture the tragedy in William Faulkner’s story about a poor Mississippi family traveling to bury its matriarch, but he conveys many of Faulkner’s themes “with clarity and concision.” That’s if you can understand the actors, said Ignatiy Vishnevetsky in the A.V. Club. As the Bundren clan’s patriarch, Tim Blake Nelson speaks in such a heavy accent, “it’s doubtful that even viewers raised in the Deep South” will be able to follow his thoughts. And Franco’s use of a split screen for most of the film has an effect “somewhere halfway between a graduate thesis and a video installation”: It’s interesting, provided you know that he’s trying to simulate the novel’s chorus of competing monologues. At least we should credit Franco with capturing the novel’s “determined lack of fun,” said Chris Packham in The Village Voice. From “a book that often feels like joyless homework,” he’s made a film that feels the same way.