A Review of The Sound and the Fury, a Movie by James Franco

Adaptation of The sound and the Fury book into a movie

The Sound and the Fury is a novel written by William Faulkner, an American writer. A novel is full of narrative stories, including stream of consciousness. This was one of the most characteristic novels Faulkner ever wrote, it became successful in every way. The movie that has been adapted to the book, became a large success and still is. It is adapted by director James Franco who is also an actor in the movie.

James Franco tried to create something that will compensate this kind of complex structure of a book. By taking this book and trying to make a movie of it, Franco didn’t give any kind of insight into the story that is happening before, and he creates characters in which the viewer does not need to care about. As if they are “stock characters”. Of course The Sound and the Fury is not a movie that created a sort of satirical view on the book, but a movie where Franco could not be aware of the content of the book, but making a psychological interpretation on the characters.

Adaptation of the book into the movie, is the same. It has four sections, just as the book does. The first three sections are the stories of the characters (first person story telling) from each of the three brothers. It is more of a challenge to create a character as Benjy is in the movie, since he is a mentally unstable character, who is all over the place.

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The book is very challenging to read because the time of the story telling is very different for each of the characters. Which Franco in The Sound and the Fury, managed to adapt very well. Reading the book, even though is different from any other book, a reader can take his time, and just read some parts over and over again, but when having a movie that is basically not stopping from start to finish, can be very hard to track. Not just making an adaptation of the story telling, Franco managed to adapt also the style of the book, which can very scary.

Making a movie like this, with the adaptation like this, can be very hard. Not because of the story telling, but the main issue is the emotion every character needs to give to the audience. Not just emotional dialogue, but an emotional expression of the characters face, body, thoughts, words… emotional portrayal of every section of the movie is hard to handle for the audience. Creating an emotion where the viewer does not really care about any of the characters, but jumping through sections like in seconds, can be very hard to handle emotionally. Going from a character that is solid, has no reason, to a character that is lost in the world, who is a scholar, and who is still finding himself, and than not to be enough, jumping into the third section to the character who feels angry at everything, thinks everyone betrayed him, and has his own image of the world, can be really hard to handle from the book and also from the movie.

The Sound and the Fury is a movie that is being adapted very well, from the book of William Faulkner, and is made into a great deal of living the story of each character, but not being emotionally attached to the character. Of course, something like this is very hard to judge on the adaptation, because the emotion that is being given throughout the movie is very detailed. Making an adaptation on a book like this, is very possible to do, but every detail needs to work with each other, just as Franco did in the movie.