The Sound and the Fury review – failure to do justice to Faulkner's masterpiece

William Faulkner's profound, intricate masterpiece has been rendered both trite and insipid in this adaptation by actor/director James Franco. Faulkner's 1929 novel describes the decline and fall of the Compson family of Jefferson, Mississippi over 20 years at the beginning of the last century. Here, Franco attempts to recreate the book's impressionistic style and complex structure. He makes a fist of it, but in concentrating so much on the art he fails to give the viewer any story or characters to care about.

Franco himself plays Benjy Compson, the youngest child of the clan, from whose point of view the opening third of the story is told. This poses the first challenge for both actor and director as Benjy has mental health problems, unable to express himself in anything other than an ursine roar. In Faulkner's text the reader is allowed into Benjy's mind of course, but on screen we must deduce his feelings from the outside. Franco uses elucidatory flashbacks to do this; Benjy watching something he shouldn't have, Benjy hugging a wedding dress. When that is not enough he employs the disembodied voice of a child, apparently that of a juvenile Benji, to whisper the odd lyrical phrase ("Quentin loves the shadows"). In keeping the viewer up with the story, it just about works, but of the feelings churning within Benjy's lumbering frame, we are left largely ignorant.

The same can be said of the characters afforded actual dialogue. The patriarch of the Compson clan, as played by Tim Blake Nelson, speaks only in the briefest platitudes ("I love each and every one of you") or screeds of Faulknerian sturm und drang ("victory is just an illusion"). Why, we're not really sure.

His only daughter, Caddy (Ahna O'Reilly), whose illegitimate pregnancy is at the heart of the novel's moral quandaries, could be an independent spirit tragically ahead of her time, but she is given no opportunity to show us beyond a brief moment where she admits sex can be pleasurable. Youngest child Quentin (Jacob Loeb) meanwhile is a moping drag whenever he appears. At least the eldest, Jason (Scott Haze), the villain of the piece, looks the part with rat like features and hollowed cheeks. Like everyone else in his family though, he spends less time showing his workings than he does shouting the name of a sibling and chasing them across a lawn.

Of the many possible themes; the tension between religion and secularism, between land and money, of the inexorable nature of decline, there's not a sniff. There are, however, wink wink cameos for Franco's pals Seth Rogen and Joel McHale. It also has to be said that, when awarding himself the role of Benjy, it's difficult to imagine that the words 'Oscar prospects' didn't pass through the director's mind.

The Sound and the Fury is not a cynical film though, just ham-fisted. So bogged down by form, Franco fails to get his head up enough to think about content. He does get one thing however, and that's Benjy's sensual awareness, his ability to connect with the sublime. As the 33-year-old man (or 'three for thirty years') rolls a lily between his hands or watches a solitary match burn, we see him engaging with feelings everyone else has buried, the better to concentrate on day-to-day propriety. It's a tantalising glimpse into what this film might have been, but it's very brief indeed.