The story of the pitiable, grossly impoverished, backwoods Bundren family and their calamitous attempts to transport their matriarch's coffin to a distant Mississippi town for burial following her agonizing death. I went into James Franco's adaptation of As I Lay Dying rolling my eyes just the same as every other person upon hearing that James Franco adapted William Faulkner. As cumbersome and flat as the film is, I surprisingly found myself half admiring the earnest attempt made to bring a challenging, cerebral, and probably untranslatable novel to the big screen, while the other half was still keenly aware that it just wasn't working.
