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David Lynch has died. A number of my film-knowledgeable acquaintances have been making film-knowledgeable posts about this, but I confess mostly blissful ignorance of Lynch’s repertoire. With two major exceptions, I haven’t seen his films. After reading a couple synopses, with apologies to any Lynch fans in my readership, I’m very happy to keep it that way. Call me square, but I simply don’t have the stomach for films heavy on horror, sex, and twisted violence.
However, those two exceptions are enough to prove that Lynch at his best could produce work of rare genius, beauty, and humanity. One of them is The Elephant Man. The other, which I’ll be discussing today, is The Straight Story.
When the movie premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 1999, the whole audience laughed at the opening credits: “Walt Disney Pictures Presents a Film by David Lynch.” Lynch himself had laughed when someone told him it would probably get a PG rating. In fact, it ended up being rated G. Audiences today can stream it on Disney+. It is a strange, never-repeated thing: a David Lynch movie safe for the whole family. But that description could lead someone to assume that it’s a simplistic, tidy story, a story in which characters are untouched by the dark, the weird, or the senselessly tragic. That would be a mistake.
Substantially, it’s a true story, based on the real-life Midwestern odyssey of a stubborn septuagenarian named Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth, in a career-final, Oscar-nominated turn). Crippled and legally blind, Straight piloted a riding mower 260 miles from Iowa to Wisconsin, at a blazing 5 miles an hour. His mission was simple: to visit a long-estranged brother and make peace. That uncanny, iconic image would inspire screenwriters Mary Sweeney and John E. Roach to go back to their own Midwestern roots, crafting a lean screenplay that allowed the land and its people to speak for themselves. At the time, Sweeney was David Lynch’s collaborator and lover. When she brought him the script, he was captivated. Here was a movie unlike anything he’d done before, but still just strange enough, sad enough, that he could make it his.
The film begins with a shot of the starry sky. Alvin loves the stars. He remembers how he and his brother Lyle used to lie next to each other looking up at them, so many years ago. At no point in the film does Alvin or anyone else launch into a wordy monologue about them, about how small or how awed they make us feel, about our place in the big wide universe and What It All Means. But through these characters’ episodic, quaint little encounters with each other, we are being subtly invited to engage in our own contemplation.
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