It was always going to be a disaster. Or a masterpiece. There’s really no middle ground when you’re talking about a guy like James Franco trying to film a "unfilmable" book by William Faulkner. Most people in Hollywood looked at the 1930 novel and saw a nightmare of stream-of-consciousness internal monologues and 15 different narrators. Franco looked at it and saw a chance to use split-screens.
The As I Lay Dying film came out in 2013, and honestly, the internet hasn’t stopped arguing about it since. If you’ve ever sat through a college lit class, you know the story. The Bundren family is hauling their mother’s rotting corpse across Mississippi because she wanted to be buried in Jefferson. It’s macabre. It’s funny in a "I’m going to hell for laughing" way. It’s deeply, deeply Southern.
The Problem With Translating Faulkner to the Big Screen
Let’s be real. Faulkner didn’t write for movies. He wrote for the inside of the human brain. When you read the book, you’re jumping from the perspective of a young kid like Vardaman—who famously thinks his mother is a fish—to the stoic, logical mind of Cash, the carpenter.
How do you film that?
Franco’s big swing was the split-screen technique. For huge chunks of the As I Lay Dying film, the screen is literally divided in two. One side might show a close-up of a character’s face while the other shows the wide shot of the wagon crossing a river. It’s jarring. Some critics, like those at The Hollywood Reporter back in 2013, found it distracting. They felt it pulled you out of the story.
But there’s another way to look at it. Faulkner’s prose is fractured. By forcing the audience to look at two things at once, Franco was trying to mimic that feeling of being overwhelmed by different perspectives. It wasn’t just a gimmick; it was a desperate attempt to respect the source material. Whether it actually worked is a different story entirely.
Casting the Bundren Clan
The cast is actually pretty stacked, which is something a lot of people forget. You’ve got Tim Blake Nelson as Anse Bundren. He is unrecognizable. He’s got the sunken cheeks, the missing teeth, and that specific brand of lazy selfishness that makes Anse one of the most hated characters in American literature. Nelson is the anchor of the movie.
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Then there’s Logan Marshall-Green as Jewel. He’s the "golden boy" with the horse, the one who doesn't talk much but feels everything. Franco himself plays Darl, the most complex of the brothers. Darl is basically the philosopher of the family, the one who sees too much and eventually loses his mind because of it.
- Tim Blake Nelson: Brings a gritty, almost grotesque realism to Anse.
- Ahna O'Reilly: Plays Dewey Dell, capturing the quiet desperation of a girl with a "secret" in a world that doesn't care.
- Danny McBride: Wait, Danny McBride? Yeah. He plays Vernon Tull. It’s a restrained performance that reminds you he’s actually a great actor when he’s not shouting about power tools.
The chemistry between them feels like a real family that’s been trapped in the sun too long. They’re irritable. They smell like a dead body. They’re exhausted.
Why the Split-Screen Divides the Audience
You can't talk about the As I Lay Dying film without talking about that vertical line down the middle of the frame. It’s the elephant in the room. In some scenes, it’s used to show the internal and external reality of a character simultaneously.
Think about the river crossing. It’s the climax of the first half of the story. The mules are drowning. The coffin is floating away. Cash is breaking his leg. In the book, this is chaos. In the film, the split-screen allows Franco to show the physical struggle on one side and the haunting, silent reactions of the family on the other.
Is it pretentious? Maybe.
But Hollywood is full of "safe" adaptations that strip all the soul out of a book just to make it linear. Franco didn't do that. He kept the weirdness. He kept the monologues where characters look directly into the camera and speak their thoughts. It feels like a filmed play, but with the dirt of a 1930s farm under its fingernails.
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The Sound of 1930s Mississippi
The sound design is something most reviews missed. It’s incredibly sparse. There’s no swelling orchestral score trying to tell you how to feel. Instead, you get the sound of saw blades, the creak of a wagon, and the buzzing of flies.
Those flies are important.
As the journey drags on, the "presence" of Addie Bundren (the mother) becomes more about the smell and the decay than the memory of the woman. The film leans into the "Southern Gothic" label. It’s dusty. Everything looks like it’s covered in a layer of fine silt. It captures that specific Faulknerian heat—the kind of heat that makes people do crazy things.
Comparing the Film to the Novel (The Brutal Truth)
If you’re a Faulkner purist, you’re probably going to hate parts of this. You just are. The movie cuts out some of the more esoteric internal monologues because, frankly, they would be boring on screen. Film is a visual medium.
However, the As I Lay Dying film succeeds in its atmosphere. It doesn't try to make the Bundrens "likable." In a lot of modern movies, there's a pressure to make the protagonists relatable. The Bundrens aren't relatable. They are flawed, often mean, and driven by weird, selfish motivations. Anse isn't taking his wife to Jefferson just because he loves her; he wants a new set of teeth. The movie doesn't shy away from that cynicism.
Why It Didn't Blow Up at the Box Office
The movie premiered at Cannes in the Un Certain Regard section. That tells you everything. It wasn't made for a Friday night at the local multiplex. It’s an art-house film through and through.
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It also suffered from the "James Franco Fatigue" that was starting to set in around that time. He was everywhere—teaching classes, writing books, acting in blockbusters, and directing experimental films. People were ready to dismiss it as a vanity project before they even saw it.
But looking back a decade later, it’s one of the more honest adaptations of a difficult book. It’s messy. It’s experimental. It’s occasionally annoying. But so is the novel.
Final Practical Takeaways for Viewers
If you’re planning to watch the As I Lay Dying film, don’t go in expecting The Notebook. Go in expecting a fever dream.
- Read the SparkNotes first: If you haven’t read the book, the first 20 minutes will be confusing. Knowing who the characters are helps immensely because the movie doesn't hold your hand.
- Watch the background: Because of the split-screen, there is often more "story" happening in the peripheral than in the center.
- Pay attention to Vardaman: The child’s perspective is often the most tragic and surreal part of the story, and the film handles his "fish" metaphor with surprising grace.
The movie is currently available on various streaming platforms like Amazon Prime and Apple TV for rent or purchase. It remains a polarizing piece of cinema, but for anyone interested in how literature can be deconstructed and rebuilt for the screen, it’s essential viewing.
To get the most out of the experience, try watching it back-to-back with Franco’s adaptation of The Sound and the Fury. It shows a clear progression in how he approached Faulkner's "unfilmable" prose, moving from the aggressive split-screens of As I Lay Dying to a slightly more traditional (but still fractured) narrative style. If you're a student of film, comparing the two provides a masterclass in experimental adaptation techniques.