October 21–28, 1999
movie shorts
Directed by David Lynch
A Walt Disney Pictures release
recommended
Few images stir more emotion in the American breast than the sight of white highway lines zipping across a movie screen. But in The Straight Story, the lines don’t zip: They crawl. An all-American road movie with an unusual protagonist, it’s the story of Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth), a 73-year-old Iowa man who sets out to visit his brother Lyle in Wisconsin after word comes that he’s had a stroke. The catch is that Alvin, who walks with two canes, can’t see well enough to hold a driver’s license, and he’s too stubborn a man to let anyone else drive him. So Alvin sets out on his cross-state odyssey on the only vehicle he is allowed to drive: his decades-old riding mower.
The kind of man who’d sooner lie on the kitchen floor for hours than call for help, Alvin hasn’t spoken to his brother in a decade, since an alcohol-fueled fight drove a wedge between them. But now, faced with the very real possibility that it may be his last chance, Alvin knows the time has come to make peace with his brother — and knows that the responsibility is his alone.
This might not be the kind of story you’d expect from David Lynch; for weeks I’ve been having fun telling people that the new David Lynch movie was rated G and produced by Disney, then watching their puzzled reactions. But on reflection, it’s not so much of a stretch. Where a movie like Blue Velvet is best remembered for its sudden flashes of violence and bizarre imagery, it’s bookended by Lynch’s unironic evocation of the beauty of small-town America: lovebirds chirping, blandly beautiful Kyle McLachlan and Laura Dern cooing into each other’s ears. Thanks to Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks, Lynch has become the poster boy for small-town weirdness, but it’s always been clear how strong a pull the old-fashioned ideals of picket fences and friendly neighbors have on the Missoula, MT, native.
There’s hardly been a profile written of Lynch that didn’t use the words "boy scout" to describe his demeanor, and that sensibility is all over The Straight Story, in which characters swear by saying things like, "Oh, for cry-yi!" At the movie’s center is a monologue by Alvin in which he tells a teenage hitchhiker about the importance of family. "I used to play a game with my children," he tells her, where he would ask them to break sticks in half, then "tie all the sticks in a bundle and try to break that. Of course, they couldn’t. That’s family." The speech is pure corn, of course, but coming from Farnsworth (who’s six years older than Straight) it sounds more like wisdom.
John Roach and Mary Sweeney, who wrote the script, based it on a true story (the real Alvin Straight died three years ago), and as fits such a plainspoken tale, Lynch’s style is understated here. But cinematographer Freddie Francis (who’s in his 80s) captures the wide-open vistas of Iowa’s plains with a crystalline sense of promise. Perhaps the film’s most extravagant shot is its first, a long tracking crane shot which takes in the exterior of the house where Alvin lives with his daughter Rose (Sissy Spacek). As she leaves the house and Alvin’s next-door neighbor distracts herself with tanning mirrors and Snoballs, a wind begins to blow, and the camera slowly approaches the side window of Alvin’s house just in time to catch the sound of him falling to the floor.
That rushing wind is as close as The Straight Story gets to Lynch’s usual otherwordly preoccupations. It suggests fate, perhaps, or the force of his brother’s stroke traveling to him before he even learns it’s occurred. But more than that, it suggests change, something that David Lynch needs at least as badly as Alvin Straight. His last several films have been dreadful retreads, especially Lost Highway, and it may be that this nimble-fingered fable will help him pull himself out of his rut. To be frank, The Straight Story isn’t as important or thought-provoking a movie as Blue Velvet or Eraserhead. But you get the feeling this was exactly the movie David Lynch needed to make.