By JANET MASLIN, New York Times, May 22, 1999

CANNES, France -- David ("Blue Velvet") Lynch floored audiences at the Cannes International Film Festival on Friday with an eloquently simple, deeply emotional G-rated movie, "The Straight Story," whose unassuming 79-year-old star gives the best leading performance to be seen here. And that was only the second-biggest surprise of the day.

(Dogma review snipped)

Lynch's film is also a religious experience in its own way. It tells the true story of a man named Alvin Straight who rode a lawn mower from Laurens, Iowa, to Mount Zion, Wis., a considerable distance, in hopes of visiting a brother from whom he had become estranged.

The traveler's role is played with immense dignity by Richard Farnsworth, whose movie roles have been infrequent and never on a par with this one. Once a stunt extra, Farnsworth drove a chariot in "The Ten Commandments" and carried a sword in "Spartacus." He still lives on a ranch in New Mexico, and looked perfectly at home in a cowboy hat at the casino in the Carlton Hotel.

"The Straight Story" was shot in towns Straight had really passed through and it has the kind of forthright verisimilitude that is attained only through careful effort. (Jack Fisk's clean, unobtrusive production design and Angelo Badalamenti's uncharacteristically lilting, rustic music heighten the effect.)

"I think it may be my most experimental film," said Lynch. This was not an implausible thought. "Tenderness can be just as abstract as insanity."

Lynch lives with Mary Sweeney, who with John Roach wrote a screenplay that artfully defines a sense of life's meaning through the stages of Alvin's journey. That's why the director knew about this story, but not why he chose to film it.

He mentioned David Mamet ("The Winslow Boy") and Pedro Almodovar ("All About My Mother") among filmmakers whose Cannes entries are uncharacteristically gentle. Some of that, he said, may be because violence and obscene language on screen "have been pushed to an absurd extreme, to the point where you don't feel it any more."

"I can't really explain it, but I feel a change," he added. "I feel something different in the air."