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New Century of Cinema
DOWSE Guide to the
Movies
by Tony Lee editor of
Pigasus
Press
The Straight Story
107 minutes (U) FilmFour
Director: David Lynch
review by Dawn Andrews
In David Lynch's first feature since Lost Highway (1996) the road is again
central to the story, but this is a very different stretch of tarmac to the one
gleaming in the crazed headlights of that film. The Straight Story is, on the
face of it, just that, based on the real-life journey of Alvin Straight, a 73 year
old man with bad eyesight and failing hips, who drives his motor mower 220 miles to
see and be reconciled with his ailing brother, Lyle. He is seeking "to make peace. I
want to sit with him and look up at the stars, like we used to do long ago." Richard
Farnsworth plays Alvin and it's a role that fits him so snugly you would think he had
been driving motor mowers across America all his life.
The opening shots of a dream-bright small town are perfect, as is all the
Freddie Jones cinematography, from lightning storms to gentle panoramas, with the
mower chugging its way across the landscape framed in a picture-postcard sunset; to
interiors, stained warm and brown, in which Alvin and his daughter Rose are at ease
with each other in domestic familiarity. Yet also a little on edge (as you are with
someone you think you know inside out) and conscious of the fact that they can still
surprise each other. Sissy Spacek plays Rose, vulnerable and overwhelmed by everyday
problems that leave her in a constant state of confused apprehension. Her speech
impediment appears, sometimes, to be produced by nothing more than sheer anxiety. So,
here they are, Alvin, walking with the aid of two sticks, half-blind, and Rose, a
'wanting' soul, gentle and inadequate. These two are oddities, anyone in the town
will tell you that, and are capable of upsetting all our notions of what 'ordinary'
actually means, as do all the characters that Alvin meets on his journey. They are
determined to go their own way, and they are extraordinary in their lack of
predictable reactions. Some have claimed that this film is an 'oddity', or a case of
selling-out by one of the great surrealists of our time, but for me, this was typical
Lynch territory, ordinary people doing extraordinary things, either by choice, or out
of a stubborn determination to win out and if possible to put things right.
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