So, I said with yesterday’s review that I wanted to covered a couple movies from my Criterion Channel watchlist before they left the service at the end of July. And while both films left Criterion Channel at the end of July, I didn’t realize that neither of them was on my watchlist. Other movies were that also left the service, but movies tend to pop up here and there. I am sure that some of them will be back, if not on Criterion, then somewhere. However, both movies were on my Fill-In Filmography, so I wouldn’t say I didn’t want to see them at all.
Though I didn’t realize director David Lynch directed something that is actually a Disney movie because The Straight Story was distributed by Disney.
Elderly Iowa man Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth) is a stubborn old man who refuses to get much checked out after a bad fall. He won’t go to see if a lifetime of smoking has given him emphysema or any sort of x-rays. He won’t even use a walker given his bad hips and gets around with a pair of canes instead. He lives with his adult daughter Rose (Sissy Spacek) who may or may not be “slow” given her halting speech patterns, but Alvin seems to have life about where he wants it. Then word reaches him that his estranged brother Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton) had a stroke, and as the pair hadn’t spoken in ten years, Alvin decides to go visit his brother in Wisconsin. However, with his eyesight and hips, he can’t drive a car. He won’t let anyone else take him either. The only thing for him to do is hook a trailer up to the back of his riding mower and very slowly drive there himself.
Naturally, Alvin’s trip is far from uneventful, particularly given the age of his lawn mower. But the ride allows Alvin to reflect on life, aging, and what really matters. He meets a lot of kind people along the way, but he’s a World War II veteran, so he isn’t much afraid of camping out in the middle of nowhere. Based as it is on a true story, the movie is basically just one really long, very slow road trip to a destination where Alvin may or may not even be welcome to go in the end. But really, family is important. An old man has to try.
I am honestly amazed, given his reputation, that David Lynch directed this movie. Even his relatively straightforward biopic The Elephant Man had a couple surreal dream sequences. The strangest The Straight Story ever gets is a woman ranting because she somehow keeps running over deer on a lonely patch of road, followed by Alvin cooking some of the carcass of the most recent kill and being mildly creeped out by some concrete deer standing nearby. The movie is basically a true-to-life character study with naturalistic dialogue where Alvin meets people, says what little he has to say, and then moves on as he works his way to Lyle’s house. He offers what wisdom he has when asked, but there’s nothing at all earthshattering about what’s happening here, and the movie never pretends for a moment to be anything more than that. The central theme if there is one is about the importance of family, and that alone may explain why this movie was distributed by Disney.
Instead, Lynch grounds the movie with a wonderfully warm central performance by Farnsworth. The veteran character actor earned his Oscar nomination with this one, showing a stubborn old man who knows how to dicker with lawnmower repairmen, refuses help beyond what he can get on his own more often than not, and goes from befuddlement to absolute delight when he watches a crowd of cyclists pass him on what looks like some kind of road race. He meets kind people, and the worst that he’s treated is a passing truck blows his hat off. Meanwhile, Lynch shows just how beautiful Iowa farmcountry can be. I wasn’t expecting anything like what I got when I sat down for this one, and I am quite frankly glad to have seen it.
Grade: A
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