I first came across THE STRAIGHT STORY through a clip of Norm MacDonald talking about Richard Farnsworth. Farnsworth had been riddled with cancer during the shoot — a fact he kept from most people, including parts of his own family. When he was done, he did what Norm called "a stuntman's death." He had been nominated for an Academy Award for the role, and Norm's point was simple: if he had announced the cancer, he would have won for sure. He didn't announce it. Nothing advertises its own importance in THE STRAIGHT STORY — not Farnsworth's performance, not David Lynch's direction, not even the premise of an old man crossing Iowa and Wisconsin on a riding lawnmower to reconcile with his estranged brother. The movie simply starts the engine.
I hadn't seen it. I wanted to.
The story is true. In 1994, 73-year-old Alvin Straight learned his estranged brother had suffered a stroke. Unable to drive a car, he hitched a small trailer to his John Deere riding lawnmower and made the journey to Wisconsin. It took six weeks. I initially assumed this was the kind of "true story" that gets softened and sweetened for the screen. It isn't. Lynch takes the story at face value. There is no speech explaining why the lawnmower had to be the vehicle. Alvin just goes.
In 1999, a David Lynch film carried expectations shaped by BLUE VELVET, WILD AT HEART, and LOST HIGHWAY. Audiences were trained to look for the rot beneath the pleasant surface. A G-rated Lynch movie felt like either a reassuring anomaly or a very specific kind of trap. THE STRAIGHT STORY is neither. The Lynch undertow remains — in Angelo Badalamenti's score, in the way small towns feel slightly weighted, in conversations that tilt a degree or two sideways — but the darkness isn't hidden evil in people. It lives in time, age, distance, memory, and the night sky. Here, charm and creepiness are the same thing.
What holds the film together is that Lynch doesn't rank his material. It opens on a shot of stars and closes on the same shot. In between, Lynch gives identical weight to the cosmic and the mundane: the night sky and an argument over a grabber at Ace Hardware, a woman unraveling over the number of deer she has hit, a mower breaking down on a hill, two estranged brothers sitting together after years of silence. None of it is treated as more or less important than anything else. The stars, the wheat fields, the roadside encounters, the failing machinery — they all belong to the same fabric. Alvin doesn't move across this world so much as within it. The lawnmower makes that possible. At five or ten miles an hour, you remain part of the landscape. You are reachable.
That pace becomes the film's philosophy. People talk to Alvin because he moves slowly enough to be talked to. A car puts glass and speed between you and the world; the mower does not. He meets a runaway girl, bickering twin mechanics, a fellow veteran — encounters a faster trip would have missed entirely. "It's an amazing thing what you can see while you're sittin'," he says over a beer. It feels less like folk wisdom than a simple report from the field. There is one moment where this pace is taken from him: a drive belt snaps on a hill and suddenly he is moving faster than he has moved in the entire film, completely against his will. It ends badly. The hill doesn't care about his philosophy. Lynch doesn't editorialize. He just shows you the hill.
Most films about old age subtly sell its virtues. THE STRAIGHT STORY refuses. Alvin offers observations the way a farmer reports the weather. When young cyclists ask what's good about getting old, he says he's seen enough life to separate the wheat from the chaff. Asked about the worst part, he answers without pause, without underlining: "The worst part of being old is rememberin' when you was young." No music swells. Lynch cuts away. The line lands because nothing is done with it — a description that also fits Richard Farnsworth's performance. At 79 and in real pain, he refused to perform his suffering, just as his character refuses to perform his wisdom.
THE STRAIGHT STORY doesn't stay heavy for long. A woman Alvin encounters on the road has hit so many deer that she's worked herself into a genuine existential crisis about it — the escalating body count delivered with complete exasperation, funny in a way where comedy and sadness stop being entirely separable. Shortly afterward, Alvin drives by with deer antlers mounted on the front of his trailer, and Lynch offers no comment. At an Ace Hardware, Alvin attempts to purchase a grabber from the shopkeeper — offers five dollars, gets a firm counter of ten, and eventually pays the ten with the resignation of a man who has decided exactly what a grabber is worth and knows he lost. Everett McGill, who Lynch fans will recognize from TWIN PEAKS in a completely different role, plays the John Deere dealer Alvin eventually does business with: solid, unhurried, trustworthy. Two straightforward men conducting straightforward business. And then there is Rose, played by Sissy Spacek, who arrives looking like a supporting character there to establish Alvin's domestic situation. Then Alvin, in conversation with a stranger, describes what she has lived through — and the picture that emerges stops the film cold. Lynch gives every character in this film the same patient attention he gives Alvin. No one is just scenery.
I came to the film with my own small experience. When I was four or five, my father drove our riding lawnmower to a family friend's house about a quarter mile away, crossing a fairly busy street to do it. My siblings and I thought it was the greatest thing we'd ever seen. The premise of THE STRAIGHT STORY never struck me as inherently absurd. There is a logic to lawnmower transportation in the right landscape, and Lynch understands it completely.
The film opens and closes under the stars not to emphasize human smallness against an indifferent universe, but because the stars belong to the same fabric as the wheat fields, the broken mower, the deer woman, and the distance between two brothers. When Alvin finally reaches Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton), the two men sit together with little need for words. This is where knowing that the Farley brothers — who play the bickering twin mechanics earlier in the film — had lost their own brother, Chris, becomes almost unbearable. Farnsworth and Stanton barely require dialogue. The distance has been crossed. The stars are still there.
THE STRAIGHT STORY is a film without villains, explanatory speeches, easy sentimentality, dramatic catharsis, or self-importance. Richard Farnsworth was refusing things too — the sympathy, the mythology, maybe even the Oscar Norm MacDonald was convinced he would have won. Lynch made a film that doesn't ask to be admired. Farnsworth gave a performance that doesn't ask to be admired. The straight story, it turns out, is the hardest one to tell.
Final Verdict: 94 out of 100