The Straight Story (1999)
Whoever thought that David Lynch would make the first art-house
Disney film? In one of the strangest turns of this strange cinematic
year, Lynch has given us The Straight Story, a picture not only
released by Walt Disney Pictures, but one whose general outline
resembles traditional Disney fare.
The wonder is that Lynch has not only made the material his own,
hes made one of the most beautiful American pictures in
recent memory, a laid-back, earth-toned curiosity piece thats
brimming with unexpected emotion.
The Straight Storys parable-like narrative is based on actual
events. Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth) is 73 years old and
living in Laurens, Iowa, with his mentally-challenged daughter
Rose (Sissy Spacek, in a brave, if brief, performance). Alvins
mortality is already on his mind when the film opens. His bad
hips force him to walk with two canes, and the doctors want him
to give up his beloved Swisher Sweets. This awareness is underscored
when Alvin receives word that his younger brother, Lyle, has had
a stroke.
The two men havent spoken in 10 years the movie doesnt
worry about what caused the bad blood but Alvin, intent
on repairing this bridge to his past, decides to swallow his pride
and go see Lyle. The only problem is that Lyle lives in Wisconsin,
more than 300 miles away. Alvin cant drive, so he buys himself
a small mountain of wieners and Braunschweiger, climbs onto his
1966 John Deere riding lawn-mower (speed: five miles per hour),
and sets off up the road, knowing it will be his last adventure.
"Hell never make it past the grotto," one of his
fellow fogies predicts.
But what looks like a lark on the surface a brittle old
man on a lawn mower who is comically dwarfed by the semis whipping
past him never loses its deeper urgency. During his trip,
Alvin shares his campfire and his life with the people he encounters,
among them a runaway teenaged girl, a family man who detects a
kindred soul in the wayfarer, a pair of bickering twin brothers,
and a country priest. He imparts a sense of gentleness to each
of them, but The Straight Story refrains from giving him too many
answers it doesnt canonize him. In the instances
that he delivers direct advice, its addressed to himself
as much as his listeners. The importance of family ties is Alvins
favorite theme, for hes figured out at this late date that
its the only glue holding his world together. His natural
reserve fits perfectly into the understated blackout sketches
that screenwriters Mary Sweeney and John Roach use to tell his
story each scene makes a simple point or two and then quietly
slips away.
Farnsworth cuts a much different figure than he did 15 years ago
as the aging outlaw in The Grey Fox. Hes lean to the point
of wispiness, the courtly, melodious voice has given way to a
brusquer way of speaking, and the once twinkling eyes are here
rheumy and bloodshot. But like the outlaw Bill Miner, Alvin carries
about himself a pointed if threadbare fierceness. (It flashes
up like heat lightning when a teenager offhandedly patronizes
the old man.) Alvins many sorrows his past boozing,
the kids who died in childbirth, and so on make up the
bedrock of his determination to see his brother one last time.
The trip is his way of healing wounds inflicted by the past.
Despite its intimate story line, The Straight Story is a big-screen
movie. Once Alvin sets out on his little green tractor, Lynch
and cinematographer Freddie Francis turn the movie into an ode
to the open road. The film was shot along the route taken by the
real Alvin Straight, and his journey is turned into a fluid array
of crane, Steadicam, and helicopter shots edited together with
choreographic precision. Two or three long montages fold Alvins
restless soul together with Americas distances and beauty,
and the autumnal lyricism of these sequences is backed by mellow
fiddle and guitar duets scored by Lynchs long-time composer,
Angelo Badalamenti. The movies overall effect is generous,
harmonious; its so seamlessly put together that you feel
like youre seeing in every direction at the same time.
And yet all around its edges, The Straight Story is buzzing with
Lynchs signature quirks: the eye-boggling blotches of beach
towel colors; people engaged in mystifying bits of inscrutable
physical business; peripheral characters on whom your mind bestows
some generic appellation (in this case, "The Deer Lady")
which you later notice is exactly the name given to them in the
credits; unsettling visual effects (a dissolve from Alvins
house to a field of grass is timed to make it appear that the
house is sprouting vegetation); and inexplicably right-feeling
details, such as the pack of dogs that tears through the streets
of Alvins town like a gang of giddy delinquents.
Lynchs first two films were at the least very good, and
his fourth one, Blue Velvet, was a flat-out masterpiece, an erotic
comedy of horrors whose idiosyncratic and malignant vision was
accessible, even palatable, to mainstream audiences. But after
bringing the same sensibility to television or at least
as much of it as the market would bear in Twin Peaks, he
seemed to lose his way. He made the abysmal Wild at Heart, and
overnight his gift for fragile alchemy began to look like charlatanism.
His last film, Lost Highway, was infested with all of his usual
obsessions, but it was heavy with empty flourishes and populated
by mannequins, and the deadpan cops and koan-spouting psychos
no longer charmed or tantalized because so little feeling could
be sensed behind them. Lynch was slumming in a void of in-jokes
and easy grotesques; he was playing to the art-house rabble.
For the moment, at least, hes replaced his freak-worship
and mirror-maze storytelling with something more straightforward.
A lot of Lynch fans are going to despise The Straight Story for
its emotionality and homiletic sense of virtue, and because it
displays an unalloyed affection for the flapjack side of America
that were used to seeing him kid and scorch. Its hard
to imagine Lynch tarrying in this vein for even one more film,
but in the meantime hes recovered something essential in
his art. The Straight Story is once again grounded in the world
that all of us share, and in the trajectory of Lynchs career
it feels like an acoustic set played by a burned-out rocker whos
decided to get back to basics. Maybe now he can cut some fine
new tunes.
- Tom Block
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