Director Report Card: David Lynch (1999)

10. The Straight Story 

David Lynch is, above all else, unpredictable. So much of the cult following that surrounds his work is based in how unexpected it is, in how it breaks the rules of traditional narratives. So, in 1999, Lynch would do the most unexpected thing of all: He would direct a G-rated Disney movie. Yes, much of the press surrounding “The Straight Story” addressed David Lynch leaving behind the sexual depravity, intense violence, and surreal horror that defined his output up to that point. Even the positive reviews that greeted “The Straight Story” were tinged with surprise a filmmaker known for deep weirdness would team up with the squeaky-clean studio to tell a family friendly story. Yet, upon deeper examination, “The Straight Story” is as much a David Lynch movie as anything else the director has made.

Drawing inspiration from a real life story, “The Straight Story” follows Alvin Straight, a 76 year old man from Iowa. Alvin's eye sight is weak, his lungs are bad from a lifetime of smoking, and he recently couldn't get off his kitchen floor after a bad stumble. His daughter, the mentally disabled Rose, is increasingly concerned about him. Around this time, Alvin receives news that his brother  Lyle, who he has not spoken to in ten years, had a stroke. Lyle lives in Wyoming and Alvin, obviously, can't drive a car. Still determined to reconnect with his brother, he instead jumps on his lawnmower and begins a journey across the Midwest.

The immediate temptation might be to ask, “what motivated David Lynch to direct something so different from his usual style?” The truth is it's easy to see why this story, and John Roach and Mary Sweeney's script, appealed to the director. Lynch's films have often featured long digressions, scenes devoted to comical episodes among everyday people or odd occurrences glimpsed briefly. “The Straight Story” is, essentially, a feature-length digression. The film is set in a succession of small towns, each one folksier than the last. The film's frequent humor arises out of the mildly absurd conversations people have, concerning grabbers or sausages. The film even includes some industrial rumbling on the soundtrack, after a visit to the exterior of a factory. Though lacking in the R-rated content Lynch is famous for, “The Straight Story” quickly reveals itself littered with his usual obsessions and fascinations.

More than ever before, “The Straight Story” sees Lynch finding the surreal in the every day. While nothing that happens inside the film is impossible, it's also somewhat out-of-the-ordinary. The film's central image – an old man on his lawnmower, traversing the Midwest countryside – isn't the kind of thing you see everyday, now is it? “The Straight Story” is built upon images like that. Alvin awakens one day to a rush of bicyclists speeding down the road around him. One of my favorite episodes in the film occurs when Alvin spots a woman hitting a deer, the driver soon ranting about how common this happens to her. It's all a little weird, all just strange enough to make you wonder at the whimsy of the world. Without going too far, “The Straight Story” still finds its director occupying a dream-world version of American life.

As much as “The Straight Story” is focused on the whimsical asides of small town American life, this is primarily a story about the weight of age. Alvin is an old man. His body is failing him. He can't even trust his own legs to hold him up anymore, can't do something as simple as drive a car. Yet it's not just his physical health that is bothering Alvin. During a seemingly minor but key moment, he tells a group of young people about how age catches up with you. Throughout the film, he reflects on things that have happened to him and his family. You get the impression that Alvin's head and heart are overflowing with these memories, events that he can't quite resolve.

It's especially notable that Alvin is a veteran. While traveling through a small town on his mower, Alvin catches the attention of a group of locals. Soon, he ends up in a bar with another elderly old man. Both of them are veterans of World War II. The two men end up sharing stories from their time overseas. Both recollections are traumatic, both men letting out memories that have haunted them their entire lives. Memories that neither have ever been able to speak before. Earlier, Alvin says the worst part of growing old is remembering when you were young. Yet it's clear that what haunts him the most, why he seeks his brother out again before both of their lives end, is how life leaves some matters unresolved. He seeks closure, catharsis, because he knows some events – like lingering war wounds – can never truly be finished.

Another key encounter along Alvin's road trip is a fire side chat he has with a teenage runaway. The girl has fled her home because she's pregnant and assumes her parents won't be sympathetic. Alvin discusses his own family history. The film deploys a not-exactly-subtle metaphor about a bundle of sticks, how one breaks on its own but together they are strong. Even though Alvin delivers this speech himself, it's a lesson he's clearly still trying to apply to his own life. His disconnect with his own brother, and his desire to mend it, is clearly what drives him to go on this journey. He seeks to mend his own bundle of sticks.

Most of David Lynch's stories of small towns focus on the hidden dark sides underneath the idyllic veneers. Even then, it's also been obvious that Lynch has a soft spot for the people inside these places. “The Straight Story” has the director casting away his concerns about the ugliness hiding under the small town. Instead, he focuses on the kindness of strangers, the sweetness of the everyday people encounter there. After his tractor nearly careens off the road, a family takes Alvin in for the afternoon. The man debates with his wife over what the right thing to do is, over how to help the old man. He offers him a ride but Alvin turns him down. More than once, Alvin finds himself being helped out by a stranger, such as the truck driver that carries him the rest of the way to his destination at the end. Though Lynch has spend nearly his whole career focusing on the evil that men do, “The Straight Story” sees him showing the kindness inside the small town heart as well.

What makes “The Straight Story's” ruminations on aging and regrets even more meaningful is its leading man. Richard Fransworth was 79 at the time of filming, around the same age as Alvin Straight is in the story. He was also, the film producers didn't know at the time, dying of prostate cancer. The disease would be so painful for Fransworth, he would take his own life the next year. So when we see Alvin debilitated by age, we are really seeing Richard Fransworth struggling with his own poor health. When we are seeing the lifetime of regrets in Alvin's eyes, the difficulties of his memories weighing him down, we aren't really seeing acting. We are seeing Richard Fransworth himself deal with these very things. Which makes it one of the most emotionally honest performances I've ever seen in any movie.

While “The Straight Story” is obviously Farnsworth's show – he's in almost every scene – the film also has a strong supporting cast. Sissy Spack plays Alvin's daughter, Rose, a woman whose unnamed mental disorder gives her a particular pattern of speech and an awkward body language. While Rose's condition could've made her a Hollywood caricature of someone with a disability, Spacek finds a lot of humor and humanity in the role. Lynch fans will also see a few other familiar faces in the film. Everett McGill appears for a brief role as a lawnmower salesman, which seems like “Twin Peaks'” Big Ed without the secrets. While Lyle Straight only appears at the very end of the film, the always surly and down-to-earth Harry Dean Stanton makes the part memorable.

With “The Straight Story,” Lynch would reunite with cinematographer Freddie Francis for the first time since “Dune.” Considering the wide and flat landscapes “The Straight Story” takes place across, Francis provides a fittingly wide-screen look for the film. Alvin's lawnmower is often depicted as an object crossing a long stretch of land, sometimes seeming small in the frame. It's a fitting visual summation of the film's story, of an ordinary man slowly moving through a wide landscape. Save for a couple strangely shaky crash-zooms, it's a great looking movie. (Fittingly enough, considering the film's concerns with aging and finality, both in and out of text, this would also be Francis' final credit.)

Like everything else about “The Straight Story,” the soundtrack both does and doesn't seem typical of Lynch's usual output. Angelo Badalamenti provides the music once again. While Badalamenti does provide some of the mournful piano and soaring synth strings you expect from him – some of the track even having a definite “Twin Peaks”-like feeling – the score is wonderfully atypical of his usual sound in other ways. Simple guitar playing, evocative of the rural setting yet also somehow invoking the aged protagonist, appear throughout. Melancholy fiddles, bringing the solitary quality of Alvin on his journey to mind, are paired with more inspirational sounds, invoking his determination to complete his quest. It's a really lovely country-and-western style score that fits perfectly with the film, helping make its strong emotions all the more meaningful.

Perhaps because of its status as an outlier in Lynch's filmography, “The Straight Story” would be well received even by the critics that normally dislike Lynch's movie. The film would go on to be nominated for an Oscar, for Farnsworth's performance. Most of the attention that circles around “The Straight Story” still focuses on its oddball status as the G-Rated David Lynch film. (If re-rated today, the film would probably be bumped up to a PG, due to “thematic elements” or some such thing.) This not only overlooks the connections the film has to Lynch's other movies but the obvious qualities “The Straight Story” has on its own. It's a quiet, graceful, touching film, fundamentally sweet and funny. Yet these gentle qualities makes it no less powerful and no less of a Lynch feature. [Grade: A-]