REVIEW - AS I LAY DYING

The art is not in the process, it's in the product. The process is mostly hard graft. I don't want to see the process, the journey, the cogs turning and lightbulbs flashing behind the curtain, and I'm not sorry about that. Unless you've got the time and, more importantly, the skills to repackage process as product, you'd best not bother. I believe James Franco had neither when he made As I Lay Dying. Perhaps the experimentation he so profusely indulges in here is part of a much larger process, directing him toward the product that may someday be a great work of art from the oft-maligned multi-hyphenate. It feels more like a cleansing procedure, though, as Franco pitches a small few stylistic motifs and exhausts their every worth, whether or not they actually serve any. It's like he's working them out of his system. But the arduous sincerity of the film denies you the choice of accepting them and evaluating their success - the split screens, for example, are distracting and quite useless, yet Franco insists on their importance with an infuriating seriousness. His arch approach is equally detectable in his performance as actor, as he vainly skims over his character, always on a slightly different, depressed plain from his costars. The implication is that his understanding of William Faulkner's literary prose runs deeper than theirs, and indeed yours (to-camera addresses have the vibe of an educational essay), and that engaging with his role in any soulful manner would be futile, and enormously uncool. You get the impression he's about to break character and offer an impish wink down the lens at any moment. And so the efforts of the rest of the cast, not all of whom are up to the challenge anyway, are debased or ignored, and the product they're trying to achieve dies on the vine. At least it dies trying. The film, as a whole, just lies dying. And if that's the point, well, again, I'm not sorry about this, but that's just fucking boring.