The Straight Story (1999)

UK / France / USA, 112 minutes

Director: David Lynch

Writers: John Roach, Mary Sweeney

Photography: Freddie Francis

Music: Angelo Badalamenti

Editor: Mary Sweeney

Cast: Richard Farnsworth, Sissy Spacek, Everett McGill, Anastasia Webb, Barbara E. Robertson, Kevin P. Farley, John Farley, John Lordan, Harry Dean Stanton

Director David Lynch had a well-deserved reputation for making weird movies but it’s tempting to argue this is the weirdest of all. It’s also one of his best. The opening title credit is a good place to start: “Walt Disney Pictures Presents: A film by David Lynch.” It seems to pit opposites against each other in some ways, but it’s important to remember that Lynch always prized wholesome elements and details in his pictures, and contrary to popular opinion it was not ironic, cynical, or mocking. The Elephant Man is a good comparison point, but it’s there in his most famous work, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Mulholland Dr.—even Eraserhead, where the grotesque monster baby is treated with a good deal of tenderness. They all show moments of human decency. They can even make you cry when they catch you the right way.

That’s The Straight Story too. Based on real events (barely noted until the very end of the picture), Alvin Straight, a man in Laurens, Iowa, learns that his estranged brother in Mount Zion, Wisconsin, has had a stroke and may not have long to live. At one point in the picture Alvin explains to another that he is a stubborn man. That’s the only thing that remotely explains these circumstances (which really happened, remember). His eyesight is too bad to drive. He won’t take a bus or accept rides from anyone else. As he keeps saying, he has to do this “my own way.” That way is to take his riding mower, halfway on and off the shoulder of the narrow highway and topping out at no more than 20 miles an hour. It is some 300 long flat Midwestern miles at the harvest time of year and it takes him weeks.

It’s an absurd story and teeters constantly on the unbelievable. I couldn’t stop thinking there had to be a better way for him to do this. But then we wouldn’t have Alvin Straight or this wonderful yellow-brick-road story of pain and redemption. The first mower goes bust before Alvin is even 30 miles down the road. He gets himself back to town and buys another—from John Deere dealer Tom, played by Everett McGill aka Big Ed Hurley from Twin Peaks.

From then on it’s mostly the usual episodic business of a road movie. One of his first encounters is with a hitchhiking runaway teen who is pregnant, played by Anastasia Webb. He gives her a wiener for dinner, they have an easygoing, slightly barbed chat across the generations, and he lectures her (gently) on the importance of family. It’s a message she seems to take in. But there are complexities unspoken here. Alvin is on the road because he hopes to repair a relationship gone bad with his brother. He’s not one to be talking. Yet his words to the girl feel less hypocritical and somehow more earned, with natural dignity (a quality Richard Farnsworth as Alvin has in abundance).

What we learn of Alvin’s family may be somewhat surprising to many urban moderns. He had 14 kids by his wife—seven made it to adulthood. His daughter Rose, who lives with him, had four kids but they were taken away from her after an accident. Alvin was born in the 1920s (“when Calvin Coolidge was president”) and my sense is that these kinds of numbers can be typical for Midwestern farming families well into the 20th century. But it does give a sense of the scope of this story and the deep wounds, whatever they are about (we never learn), between the brothers.

The cast is amazing, notably the main players. Richard Farnsworth as Alvin grounds the picture as a decent man who knows himself. Stubborn, willful, perverse—he owns it all and asks as little as possible from others in the way of help. He goes his own way but accepts help when he must, stiffly. Sissy Spacek as Rose is enigmatic and fascinating. She has some kind of unspecified disability—she stammers and stutters and has a strange gulping way of talking. She may be developmentally disabled but I didn’t see much evidence of that. It may just be that she’s different somehow, neurodivergent, but crudely labeled in the small community. Harry Dean Stanton as Alvin’s brother Lyle is barely in the picture but he nails every second. The ending is beautiful. Alvin, attempting to explain himself on the road: “A brother’s a brother.”

Lynch’s quirks are more restrained, or isolated, but they are there, particularly in an encounter with a hysterical woman who says she keeps hitting deer on this stretch of road that is her only way to work and back. She says she has now hit 13 in seven weeks, gets in her clanking damaged car, and drives off down the road. We see later, on Alvin’s rig, that he kept the antlers.

The Straight Story is an outlier among David Lynch’s pictures and unfairly overlooked, perhaps because of that Disney connection. I like it much more than most of his mystifying stuff as the 21st century arrived and moved along—more than Lost Highway, more than Inland Empire, maybe even more than Twin Peaks 3. The heart that Lynch brought to all his pictures is just more unclouded here, stripped bare. It doesn’t miss the strangeness of life and human behavior but it doesn’t miss the kindness either.