The Straight Story (1999)

Directed by David Lynch
Written by John Roach & Mary Sweeney
Starring Richard Farnsworth, Sissy Spacek, James Cada, Wiley Harker, Sally Wingert

My Advice: Wait for Cable.

Alvin Straight (Farnsworth) is 73 years old and stubborn.  He falls down due to a hip problem and yet tells the doctor where to go when it's obvious surgery, medication and lifestyle changes are necessary.  He lives with his daughter, Rose (Spacek), and lives a pretty good life, smoking cigars and working around the house as best he can.  Then, they receive a call that his brother, Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton), has had a stroke.  With mortality on his mind, Alvin decides to travel the 350+ miles to Wisconsin to reconcile with his brother, with whom he hasn't spoken for ten years.  Problem is—-the only thing with wheels he has that he can drive is his riding lawnmower.  So he hops on and heads for Wisconsin.  Based on a true story.

There is a certain exception I always make for David Lynch films.  They are filled with interesting people who do interesting things, but none of it, in my opinion, ever really means anything.  My take on his films is that they're all huge farces full of sound and fury, but signifying nothing.  I thought we might have something different here, considering that Walt Disney and a G-rating are a bit of a departure from the man who brought us Blue Velvet.  But we're still dealing with the same director—-the opening sequence involving Alvin, Rose and their neighbors is amusingly Lynchian—-he just seems to be employing a very light touch.  Unfortunately, if it had been any lighter, the touch would have blown away in a good breeze.

The strength of the movie rides squarely on the shoulders of Farnsworth, who turns in a decent performance as Alvin, and actually makes you believe that a man exists who would be crazy/stubborn enough to pull such a stunt.  The pity is that Farnsworth's two sole missions in the film are to travel around dispensing heartwarming homilies to people that he meets (a teenage runaway, a pair of squabbling twins, and so forth) and to drive his mower.  He drives his mower for what feels like an hour of its almost two hour running time.  The viewer is presented with so many vistas of cornfields and paved two lane roads that I began to have flashbacks to the overused jungles of Thin Red Line.  The result is that when a strong scene does actually present itself, where Alvin and another WWII veteran exchange horror stories, it's left completely out to dry.  And the fact that every episode ends with a moral and a pronouncement from the sage Alvin, reduces what could have been slices of American life to…well, Super Friends episodes.

It's not a bad film, it's a very sweet touching kind of film that wants to pull on your heartstrings.  Unfortunately, it's also a very unengaging film and therefore one's heartstrings (and ass) are asleep.  I applaud Lynch for trying to branch out and do something a bit different, like most directors are these days.  I just wish it could have something more than TV movie of the week fare.  Catch it on cable.