☆ ☆ ☆ ½
The
Straight Story (1999) – D. Lynch
A change of pace for director David Lynch
and perhaps the one true oddity in his oeuvre.
In 1993, Alvin Straight, then 73 years old but with failing eyes and
legs, drove his riding mower 300 miles to visit his estranged brother who just
had a stroke (cameo by Harry Dean Stanton). Maybe Lynch saw surrealism in the
story or maybe his innate conservatism (championing family values) drew him to
the material. If you look carefully, you
can see his style of filmmaking in the way that the camera simply observes everyone
in a matter-of-fact style and the dialogue (which he didn’t script himself) is
the same sort of non-ironic plain-speaking you get from characters in his other
projects. However, this is G-rated
heart-warming material released by Disney, not a vision of the dark forces
intruding on all things wholesome (although in the very beginning when we hear
an ominous thud and the camera zooms up to a shuttered window, I wasn’t quite
sure). Only rarely do things turn a bit
weird, almost as if Lynch felt it was obligatory. But these moments distract
from the main story which is really about Straight (played touchingly by
Richard Farnsworth, who died soon after at age 80) and his interactions with
other people, including his autistic daughter, Rose (played by Sissy Spacek),
and the unbelievably kind Midwesterners he meets along the way.