Here is David Lynch’s fascinating and touching outlier movie from 1999, a gentle story told straight, without the exotic kinks and creepy asymmetries that we had come to expect and to which the director returned immediately afterwards. The movie was itself a diversion from the straight line of his habitual style. Screenwriters John Roach and Mary Sweeney (the latter a longtime Lynch collaborator and his ex-wife) adapted the true story of Alvin Straight who, in his 70s and in poor health, travelled more than 200 miles on a John Deere rider-mower from Iowa to Wisconsin to visit his ailing elder brother. Richard Farnsworth plays Alvin; Harry Dean Stanton plays his brother in cameo and Sissy Spacek plays his (fictionalised) daughter Rose.
It’s a film that presents us with the midwest decency, the picket fences and the open road that are all familiar enough from other Lynch films but without the roilingly surreal, subterranean weirdness beneath. Where Lynch usually presents stolid all-American ordinariness as the prelude to, or the surface part, of a larger dream-state, or nightmare-state, here the story of regular folks is all that there is. It’s normality all the way down. (One concerned bystander asks Alvin if he isn’t worried about the danger in solo travel: “There’s a lot of weird people around.” Not in this film there isn’t.)
The Straight Story is a heartwarmer of the sort that Lynch arguably hadn’t attempted since his version of The Elephant Man in 1980, and this was without that element of the grotesque. This is not to say that are not moments of awe and rapture, cousins to the fear and eroticism that you might find in other Lynch films. The opening sequence, in which the camera drifts and moves across a front yard, while Alvin succumbs to an off-camera fainting fit in his kitchen, has something uncanny, especially with the amplified sound of the wind in the trees. Angelo Badalamenti’s score has a disquieting beauty at this moment, before it settles into the country-inflected, faintly Mexican melodies that accompany Alvin’s stoical cross-country journey, delivered with characteristic, placid slow-dissolves.
Alvin, who needs two sticks to walk and has trouble breathing due to smoking, hears that his brother is sick – as of course is Alvin himself – and makes the stubborn and impulsive decision to travel to see him just once to patch things up between the two. He can’t drive and dislikes buses. The rider-mower it is.
Gazing at the stars is important in this film and Alvin’s encounter on the highway with a hysterically stressed woman who has killed a deer is very Lynchian – or at any rate, a kind of U-certificate Lynchian. The repeated shots of the yellow line on the freeway’s hard shoulder which rolls slowly under the frame as Alvin’s vehicle gently moseys along, are an amusing reminder of the nightmarish image of the unspooling road in Lost Highway.
Along the way Alvin meets a young pregnant woman whom he tries to help, and good-natured souls who go out of their way to indulge and help this old-timer, despite how very dangerous his pilgrimage is. (That great big refill tank of gasoline in his rickety trailer is a hazard nobody seems to mind.) Certainly no one is un-American enough to call the police, to summon the agencies of the state, and to put Alvin into care for his own good. Unlike Alexander Payne movies such as About Schmidt or Nebraska, where an older man’s journey facilities ironic and poignant self-revelations, that doesn’t happen here; Alvin is as secure in his own convictions at the end as he was in the beginning.
When I first saw The Straight Story at Cannes in 1999, I see my response was maybe a little lukewarm, perhaps due to wanting and expecting a classic Lynch film, and I muddled two bar scenes: the moment where Alvin confesses to a stranger his harrowing memory of serving in the second world war is in fact over a glass of milk. He drinks a beer later. But watched again now, I can respond more strongly to the heartfelt directness and empathy: especially the scenes that show Alvin’s difficulty walking, due very much to his unrepentant love of smoking. Lynch too had that unrepentant love, and he too found walking a difficulty and then an impossibility in his final days. Did he see in Alvin a future echo of his own existence and the long, lonely journey of a cinema vocation? It’s well worth revisiting.
• The Straight Story is in UK cinemas from 13 March.
