The Straight Story (1999) Review
8/10
Alvin Straight can’t see well enough to hold a license and won’t accept a lift. His brother has had a stroke in Wisconsin. He buys a 1966 John Deere riding mower, builds a trailer, and sets off at five miles an hour. The 8 is for total sincerity executed by the last director anybody expected to attempt it. There’s no twist, no undertow, no darkness beneath the surface of the small towns. Lynch filmed a decent man doing a difficult thing and declined every opportunity to complicate it.
Lynch is the last filmmaker I’d have picked to make a film this gentle, and I think it took more nerve than anything else he ever made. Farnsworth breaks my heart in it without once asking me to cry, and the kindness never curdles into greeting-card mush. What keeps it short of higher is that the episodic structure occasionally repeats. Alvin meets a stranger, listens, says something true, and moves on, and by the fourth instance the shape is visible.
Lynch Without the Undertow
The director of Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks spent a career finding what was wrong underneath American small towns, and here he looks at the same places and finds nothing wrong.
That’s the film’s real surprise and it’s not a gimmick. The cornfields are beautiful, the people are kind, the diners are pleasant, and none of it is setting anything up. A viewer waiting for the reveal will wait through the credits.
Freddie Francis shot it, aged eighty at the time, in wide compositions of Iowa farmland with the mower as a small moving object in enormous fields. The visual patience matches the speed of the vehicle.
Francis had shot Cape Fear and The Elephant Man and had been a director himself, and this was his last film. An eighty-year-old photographing a seventy-nine-year-old playing a seventy-three-year-old is a set of facts the picture never mentions and clearly benefits from.
Angelo Badalamenti scored it as he scored everything else for Lynch, and the difference is instructive. The same composer, the same instrumentation, and with the menace removed what remains is enormous tenderness.
That score is my favorite thing Badalamenti ever wrote. Hearing his familiar sound with all the dread drained out of it is like watching a horror actor play somebody’s grandfather and get every note right.
Mary Sweeney, who also edited the film and was Lynch’s partner, wrote the screenplay with John Roach, and they walked the route themselves. Lynch shot the film along the actual roads in sequence. That’s the third picture on this page to have been made that way.
Working against your own established tone is worth attempting once you have one. The audience arrives expecting a particular thing and the absence of it becomes a quality the work didn’t have to build.
The condition is that the restraint must be total. A single ironic moment would collapse this, because it would confirm the suspicion the audience is holding and turn the whole film into a setup.
For a writer with a reputation, the same move is available and costs more than it looks. Readers who came for what you usually do will feel withheld from, and the ones who arrive fresh have no idea anything unusual is happening.
Richard Farnsworth
Farnsworth was seventy-nine, had been a stunt man for decades before he acted, and was in considerable pain throughout the shoot from a cancer he didn’t discuss publicly.
The performance is built on physical difficulty that’s never dramatized. He gets on and off the mower slowly, uses two canes, and the film simply records how long each of these things takes. What he brings that no younger actor could is authority about the subject. Alvin talks about age, about outliving people, about not being able to do what he could, and none of it is acting at a distance.
He was nominated for Best Actor and died the following year. The performance is the whole film, because Alvin is in almost every scene and much of what he does is sit on a slow vehicle looking at fields. Farnsworth is the main reason this gets an 8 from me. I can’t imagine a younger actor faking what he does just climbing off that mower, and I don’t think the film would survive a single scene without his face.
Sissy Spacek plays his daughter Rose, who has a speech difficulty and has had her children taken from her, and the film gives her exactly one scene explaining why. It’s delivered flatly by a neighbor in about twenty seconds and the picture never mentions it again. That’s how a small town carries a thing like that.
The Encounters
The structure is a series of strangers. A runaway girl at a campfire. A group of cyclists. A woman who has hit a deer. A man in a bar who fought in the same war.
The best of them is the bar. Two old men who have never met discover they were both in the war, and they exchange the things they’ve never told anybody, quietly, in a small room, and then stop. That bar scene is the one I’d keep if I could only keep one. Two old men trading the worst memories of their lives in near whispers moves me more than any battle scene I can think of.
The runaway is the most quoted and it’s the one that flirts with sentiment. Alvin explains family using a bundle of sticks, which is a parable, and the film gets away with it because Farnsworth delivers it as something he’s said before instead of as wisdom.
She leaves before he wakes and the film never tells us whether she went home. That refusal keeps the scene from being a lesson, because a parable that visibly works turns into an advertisement for whoever delivered it, and Alvin isn’t selling anything.
The deer woman is the film’s only comic sequence and it’s funny. She’s hit thirteen deer in seven weeks on the same stretch of road, she loves animals, and she’s screaming about it in the rain while Alvin listens.
The film then cuts to him cooking one on a small fire. That’s the joke completed without a word. Lynch doesn’t comment and doesn’t linger, and the whole exchange lasts perhaps four minutes.
An episodic journey needs its encounters to vary in function instead of in content. Comic, confessional, practical and hostile, in an order the reader can’t predict.
The failure mode is the wisdom dispenser. If your traveling protagonist says something profound to every stranger, the strangers become an audience and the story becomes a lecture tour. Let one encounter give him nothing. The cyclists treat Alvin as a curiosity and ride away, and that indifference makes the ones that succeed feel unearned by design.
The Speed Is the Subject
Five miles an hour for three hundred and seventy miles takes six weeks, and the film insists on that arithmetic.
Everything follows from it. He can’t outrun weather. A hill is a real problem. A breakdown strands him in one place for days. When a truck passes it’s enormous and fast and the mower shakes.
The film runs on that inversion. Every other road movie is about the freedom of speed, and this one removes speed entirely and finds that the road becomes a different thing at a walking pace. The best sequence is the descent into Clermont, where the brakes are inadequate and the mower gathers speed downhill toward a town full of people watching a house burn. It’s the only fast thing in the picture and it’s terrifying.
What follows is the film in miniature. The town takes him in, a retired couple house him for a fortnight while a repair is argued over, and two brothers who run the garage bicker about the bill until Alvin points out that they’re brothers and should stop. He’s no authority to say it and they listen.
The Ending Is Two Words
Alvin arrives. His brother comes out onto the porch. They look at each other. Lyle asks whether he came all that way on that thing. Alvin says he did. They sit and look at the stars. It’s the entire reunion, and the film ends there. No explanation of the quarrel, no reconciliation scene, no account of the ten years. Two old men on a porch and a cut to black. Harry Dean Stanton plays Lyle and is on screen for perhaps ninety seconds. He was cast because Lynch needed somebody who could carry a decade of estrangement in a face. That’s exactly what Stanton does.
The restraint at the end makes the six weeks mean something. The film has spent two hours on the journey so it doesn’t have to explain the destination.
That ending is dead on. Lyle’s one question and Alvin’s short answer carry more feeling than a ten-minute reconciliation speech ever could, and I’d have been furious if Lynch had added a single line.
The last shot is the two of them from behind, sitting, looking up, with the mower parked beside the house. Whatever the quarrel was, it’s not going to be discussed, and both men are old enough to know that discussing it wouldn’t help.
If the journey is the story, the arrival should be short. Every minute spent explaining the reunion is a minute arguing that the traveling wasn’t sufficient. The rule generalizes to any long pursuit. Readers don’t need the conversation, they need to see that it’s happening, because they’ve already supplied the content themselves across the preceding chapters.
The payoff rests on casting. Harry Dean Stanton gets ninety seconds on that porch and almost nothing to say, and his face has to carry ten years of silence between two brothers. He does it, and I think a lesser actor would have sunk the ending.
Should you watch The Straight Story?
Yes. David Lynch made a G-rated picture about an old man on a lawnmower with no irony anywhere in it, and the sincerity holds for a hundred and eleven minutes without cracking once.
It stops at 8 for me because the middle run of encounters settles into a pattern, and by the fourth stranger I can see the next one coming. Farnsworth and that porch are reason enough to watch it anyway.
