STRAIGHT STORY, THE (G)

A beautiful, endearing, wonderfully surprising piece of work from David Lynch, a film that finds great beauty and great meaning within a single seemingly futile, outwardly ridiculous act.


BUENA VISTA-WALT DISNEY/Color/2.35/Dolby Digital/115 Mins. Cast: Richard Farnsworth, Sissy Spacek, Jane Galloway Heitz, James Cada, Everett McGill, Anastasia Webb, John Lordan, Barbara Robertson, Wiley Harker, Sally Wingert, John Farley, Kevin Farley, Ed Grennan, Harry Dean Stanton. Credits: Directed by David Lynch. Written by John Roach, Mary Sweeney. Produced by Sweeney, Neal Edelstein. Director of photography: Freddie Francis. Edited by Sweeney. Production designer: Jack Fisk. Costume designer: Patricia Norris. Music by Angelo Badalamenti. A Picture factory production.
Here are a couple of facts you can safely take to the bank. The shortest distance between any two points is a straight line, and no one ever told that to David Lynch. The man behind a number of twisted sex-and-violence romps, some of them brilliantly realized, some not so much, Lynch is a filmmaker who rarely gives his audience anything close to a straight story. But for The Straight Story, he has abandoned his more extreme sensibilities by choosing a tale, based on a true incident, of unremitting decency, dignity and generosity. If that sounds cornball and boring, you have another thing coming. While The Straight Story is not by any stretch of the imagination twisted, it isn't quite straight either-the unadorned, perfectly metered script by first-time screenwriters Mary Sweeney and John Roach finds the sublime squarely in the ridiculous. The shortest distance between any two points is a straight line, but that axiom speaks nothing to the issue of how that distance is traversed.

It's pretty difficult to speak of the concept of shortness when discussing Alvin Straight, who, in 1994, drove to visit his ailing brother over 250 miles in his riding lawnmower. He may have taken a straight line to get there, but, obviously, it was far from a short trip. But that's only a secondary point here; the movie made of this man's strange, wonderful act takes as its subject not distance, which is the quirky target lesser filmmakers would have exploited, but time-time lived, time wasted and time remaining. The Straight Story is a lyrical, majestic meditation on mortality, and the image of a 73-year-old man who now requires two canes to walk and lacks the willpower or maybe the motivation to adjust his dangerous diet of fatty meats and Swisher Sweets, the sight of this man racing against his own deteriorating health in an excruciatingly slow John Deere is one Lynch and his writers wring for all its ironic poignancy.

There are other sights beautifully utilized. With the help of veteran cinematographer Freddie Francis, Lynch captures the bucolic beauty of the Midwest countryside and its meandering, sometimes mysterious rhythms (a Lynch specialty). And then there is Richard Farnsworth. An old Hollywood stuntman who didn't take up acting until well into his 50s (The Grey Fox, The Natural), Farnsworth's lovable, grandfatherly presence has been harnessed for the role of Alvin Straight, and he plays it with an unaffected dignity that frequently takes the breath away. As Alvin travels his course and meets a stranger or two, the writers deliberately and expertly divulge moments from his long, sometimes sad history, a hard-lived life effortlessly conveyed by Farnsworth in every nook and wrinkle of his peacefully sad, weather-beaten face. There isn't a single visible seam in his remarkable work here, and Lynch knows it, allowing the camera to explore and luxuriate over Farnsworth's powerful, empathic visage. And it is there, on that sad, searching countenance which takes on more power and meaning as the true nature of the journey is slowly revealed, that Lynch finds the shortest, straightest, most direct distance between the two points that matter most, between audience and character. He and his writers connect the two points beautifully, by never neglecting to see within an outwardly foolish behavior that which is irresistibly, even profoundly, human.

-David Luty