I was surprised when I first watched James Franco's film adaptation of As I Lay Dying at how closely it followed the novel. With a few exceptions, it is essentially follows chapter-by-chapter scene-by-scene.
A couple of people mentioned on Wednesday that the film would be impossible to understand without having first read the book, and I think that is to some extent accurate. Despite the impressive similarities between the two, the mediums of moving picture and prose are sufficiently different that a viewer of the film would likely walk away with a completely different sense of the work than a reader of the novel. I think much of this has to do with the limited ability of a filmmaker to convey a character's internal monologue in a scene. For instance, Darl in the film is familiar to us, and, having read the book, we understand his stares, his nonverbal communication with Dewey Dell, and his clairvoyance. Likewise, we also understand the significance of the split-frame shots as being representative of multiple character's' viewpoints. This information is really only accessible through the book.
Despite the film following the plot of the novel linearly, there are a few thoughts I had on Franco's adaptation of certain characters. Darl is the most obvious variation. I think it is in no way a coincidence that Franco choosing to play Darl's character himself aligned with a decision to make Darl a more prominent, or at least more consistently prominent, character in the film. Although there is no hard-and-fast narrator in either the novel or the film, we talked about how the narrative emphasis shifted from Darl to Cash in the book. I didn't see a hint of such a shift in the movie, as Darl seemed to remain the "main character" throughout. I could be stretching this a little, as his prominence is pretty subtle, but I certainly think it's there.
Dewey Dell was another character in the film who differed from my perception of the character in the novel. She seems much better adjusted and self-aware in the film than in the book. I also think that this is a product of the medium. It would be difficult to translate the jumbled sentences and unique phrasing of Dewey Dell's narration in the book to the screen. I did think it was interesting that Franco chose to deliver part of her retelling of her encounter with Lafe staring directly into the camera as a deliberate act of narration. In the novel, she was always one of the characters we said didn't seem to even be aware that she is a narrator, so her direct communication with the camera is definitely a shift.
Overall, I guess I have to conclude that the inaccessibility of the film that we discussed is in part due to the inaccessibility of the novel itself. Faulkner's literary techniques are no more unconventional, perhaps, than Franco's approach to filmmaking. If I had to speak for the man, I suppose I'd say that Faulkner would approve of the adaptation.
I definitely thought that James Franco did a great job of adapting As I Lay Dying to the silverscreen and that in order to actually understand the movie, reading the book prior to watching it was necessary. The split screen technique did a good job of conveying the multiple perspectives provided by the novel and I actually thought that the interview format of the actors/actresses narration was a good way of presenting the narration. By using an interview format made it seem that the actor/actresses were narrating from the insides of their thoughts, and that effect would have been amplified with the use of placing the actors/actresses in different settings to represent the state/setting of their minds.
ReplyDeleteI think I said something to this effect in class, but I agree with your comments about Dewey Dell--and I thought the actress does a nice job with the character, and I find her compelling in her own right, with her higher degree of determination and self-knowledge. But we should picture Faulkner's character as much younger, and more innocent--she's experiencing the onset of puberty and sexuality, and she doesn't understand it at all (beyond this ambiguous feeling of being a "hot seed in the moist wild earth", a kind of undifferentiated fertility), and there's no one to explain anything to her. She should look younger, more bewildered and alone and hurt and ashamed. Her resentment of Darl has a childlike quality (not to say it's not deserved though--he taunts her about something that's so intimate and already so fraught for her). There's a familiar sibling dynamic here--"I'll tell mom! I know what you did!"--that reminds us of her youth.
ReplyDeleteI was also fairly confused by the film, even though I read and understood the book. The biggest problem for me was knowing who was speaking. It was difficult to align a section of the screen with someone's voice, since there was often a very similar picture presented on the other half. This difficulty would probably be alleviated if I watched the movie from the beginning. I would have more time to connect voices to faces and align scenes with the book.
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