The City of Absurdity The Straight Story
Reviews

The Straight Story

by Richard Peña
filmkritik.org, May 21, 1999

Richard Peña, USA. Director, The New York Film Festival
Associate Professor, Dept. Of Film, Columbia University

The word "sweet" has been applied to an amazing number of incongruous films during this year's Cannes festival. Films ranging from directors as different as Pedro Almodovar, Takeshi Kitano and Arturo Ripstein have all had their work described that way, but the adjective applies to nothing more correctly, nor sadly, than to David Lynch's The Straight Story.

Produced by France's Alain Sarde and Le Studio Canal +, this very American story, supposedly based on real events, follows the journey of Alvin Straight, a 73-year old man who traveled 350 miles (about 600 km) on a John Deere lawn mower to visit his ailing brother. The film begins typically for Lynch with images of weird "americana": a somewhat ramshackle single-standing house in rural Iowa, on whose lawn a fat woman in hot pink is sunning herself on a chaisse lounge. She turns out to be a peripheral character - probably just there for a cheap laugh - as we soon move into the world of the aged, nearly-crippled Alvin and his daughter Rose, who has some kind of speech defect which, we learn, led to her children being taken away from her (the first of the film's many suspicious incongruities). Learning that his brother Lyle has had a stroke, Alvin (who has not seen his brother for 10 years) resolves to go visit him, but lacking a car or any means of public transportation, he decides to hook a wagon to his lawn mower and make the journey, despite warnings from everyone that this is impossible.

Thus, the stage is set for a classic if very slow-moving American road movie, as the narrative is made up of a number of brief encounters Alvin has on his way. There's the pregnant, runaway teenager, who's admonished about the strength of family life and sent on her way, the yuppie bicyclists, who are given a tart dressing down about how "the worst part of being old is remembering when you were young"; and so on. As by now you're hopefully realizing, this is desperately thin, awfully clichéd stuff; the real physical problems of the journey are quickly ignored. After several lines that he'll never make it up some nearby hills, we neither see the hills, nor how he's able to conquer them; he's supposedly on the road for six weeks, yet looks pretty much the same as he did in the beginning of the film.

Along the way Alvin meets another old man to whom he confesses in a bar that during the war (World War II one supposes, although trench warfare, a World War I image, figures prominently in the story) he inadvertently killed one of his fellow soldiers, a fact he's been concealing all these years. This sets up the possibility that the trip might be seen as some kind of penance, some act of contrition for unstated sins, but nothing on this theme is further developed. Curiously, Lynch fills the film with aerial shots of blowing cornfields and virgin forests, an odd choice one might for a film whose protagonist insists beyond all reason (even when offered rides) on driving his lawn mower all the way. It creates the sense of Lynch simply looking down on the proceedings, refusing to really get close to nor understand his main character but instead to see his film as along sigh, a la Blue Velvet, that "It's a strange world". Veteran actor Richard Farnsworth plays Alvin, doing his best with the vapid aphorisms the scrip assigns him, Sissy Spacek, a fine, terribly underused actress, is wasted as Rose.

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