The Straight Story (1999)

☆ ☆ ☆ 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.