As I lay dying is exactly right.

That’s what this movie is doing.

Laying. Dying.

Now I know why it made it to Netflix so quickly.

I have to admit that I was really excited when I read that James Franco agreed to wrestle a film out of the complex novel written by the convoluted William Faulkner. What bravery. What determination.

What a failure.

I’m a big fan of James Franco. I have been since seeing him in Pineapple Express. This is not the typical Hollywood pretty boy. This is an actor willing to take risks. Franco is clearly a fan of Faulkner as well as Cormac McCarthy, my very favorite writer.

This is a risk Franco should have avoided.

As I Lay Dying is the story of the Bundren family and the arduous death of the matriarch, Addie Bundren. After witnessing her slow demise, Addie’s widower insists that his sons accompany him on a hardscrabble odyssey to deliver his wife’s body to the town of Jefferson for burial.

Faulkner is hard enough to follow. Franco doesn’t make it any easier. For some reason, he employs a bizarre split screen effect that is nothing but distracting. The actors adhere to a hillbilly mumble that is just about impossible to understand.

Now a confession. I didn’t make it to the end of the Bundren’s celluloid funeral march. In fact, I didn’t get a half-hour into this movie. It was too much work. Reading Faulkner is a chore. Watching a movie based on one of his books should be more like the cliff notes, not another frustrating exercise. The longer I lay there watching this movie, the more I felt like I was…

dying.