David Lynch (1999)

It wasn’t the original intention but I ended up seeing Lucky and The Straight Story – both for the first time and in that order – on consecutive evenings.  Although this was the wrong way round, it’s probably as well that I saw Lucky first.   If I’d watched it just after The Straight Story, I’d have been even more vexed by John Carroll Lynch’s indebtedness to David Lynch.  The two films have more in common than an old man protagonist.  Even though Lucky draws on Harry Dean Stanton’s own life, it includes scenes that echo scenes in The Straight Story – the elderly hero’s interview with a doctor who urges him to give up smoking, or sharing recollections of traumatising war experience with a virtual stranger in a barroom.  These episodes are entirely plausible, of course, in the story of a man of a particular age and generation.  But Lucky’s obeisance to David Lynch in other ways makes it hard to avoid seeing the later film as more thoroughly derivative.

The Straight Story is, in some ways, an unusual Lynch film – though you wouldn’t guess it from an opening sequence that moves fluently from a vast starry night sky, via a landscape of endless wheat fields, to the streets of a small town and its suburbia.  A posse of dogs barks and scampers through the town’s main street.  Freddie Francis’s cinematography gives the texture of home-movie footage to the preparations for sunbathing of a large woman in her small back garden.  Lynch immediately seems to be in his element, especially with music by Angelo Badalamenti in the background.  What’s unaccustomed is that this film is based on actual events; the director doesn’t also have a screenplay credit (that goes to John Roach and Mary Sweeney, also the film’s editor); and the piece is fundamentally a genre picture – a road movie.  The Elephant Man was also about a real person but the story of John Merrick’s life offered Lynch fantastical opportunities.  The title of The Straight Story – sandwiched between Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Drive (2001) in the Lynch filmography – is a pun.  It refers to the main character’s surname and acknowledges the linear simplicity of the narrative.

This doesn’t mean the story and the way Lynch tells it lack singularity.  Alvin Straight got his name in the papers in 1994 when, at the age of seventy-three, he travelled from Laurens, Iowa to Blue River, Wisconsin to visit his ailing brother.  Alvin’s failing eyesight meant he could no longer get a driver’s licence.  He didn’t trust public transport.  His mode of transport for the 240-mile trip was a riding lawnmower, towing a small trailer in which he slept.  While Lynch doesn’t quite subvert the conventions of the eventful, chance-encounter-rich road movie, his attention is often absorbed by passing sights and sounds on Alvin’s journey.  With the help of Freddie Francis (who also shot The Elephant Man and Dune for him), Lynch  characteristically invests whatever he sees – the changing weather, the open road, other vehicles on it, the shell of a house – with mystery.  The beguiling quality of the images isn’t abstract:  it chimes with Alvin’s surprise and wonderment that, late in the life that he considers a gift, he’s discovering these things or seeing them afresh.

The widowed Alvin (Richard Farnsworth) lives in Laurens with his daughter Rose (Sissy Spacek), one of his seven children.  We learn that Rose’s own children were taken into care, following a fire in which one of them was badly burned.  A neighbour was looking after the children at the time.  Alvin thinks the decision to take them away from Rose reflected prejudice against her:  she has some kind of impairment, reflected in speech that is, by turns, halting and torrential.   This family history emerges in what Alvin says to people he meets en route to Wisconsin but his conversations aren’t used repeatedly as a means of exposition of detailed backstory – the disclosures mostly seem natural.  The crucial family matter concerns Lyle, the estranged brother he’s journeying to see.  After a phone call, answered by Rose, to tell him that Lyle has suffered a stroke, Alvin feels compelled to seek him out.  ‘A brother is a brother’, says Alvin, even though the bad blood between him and Lyle makes his mission ‘a hard swallow to my pride’.

The Straight Story takes throughout a gently benign view of people – Alvin, Rose, their sunbathing, sno-ball-scoffing next-door neighbour (Jane Galloway Heitz), the man (Everett McGill) who sells Alvin a replacement lawnmower after the first one breaks down, causing a false start to his travels – and the great majority of those he meets on the road.  Some of his meetings – with a young and pregnant runaway (Anastasia Webb) near the start of the odyssey, with a priest (John Lordan), when Alvin is close to his final destination – are touching because of their brevity and lack of obvious resolution, which underline the transient, accidental nature of the meetings.

A few other episodes don’t work so well, partly because Lynch doesn’t have the scope for developing oddball characters sufficiently.  A distraught woman (Barbara Robertson) whose car has collided with and killed a deer – an all too frequent occurrence, she tells Alvin – seems overdrawn.  A pack of cyclists supplies an impressive image; when Alvin then stops briefly at their camp[1], the exchanges about youth and ageing sound a little pat.  Quite close to the state border, his transport develops serious brake problems and he has to park for a few days outside the home of a pleasant middle-aged couple (James Cada and Sally Wingert), before getting the brakes fixed.   The World War II memories conversation between Alvin and another old man (Wiley Harker) takes place during this stopover.  It’s extremely well acted but psychologically revealing in, by David Lynch’s standards, a conventional way.  The squabbling twin brothers (Kevin and John Farley) who repair the riding mower try to overcharge Alvin.  He’s wily enough to beat them down, before advising them to stop arguing with each other.  He tells them about himself and Lyle, and it’s a phony moment.  Even allowing for the brotherly enmity link, you can’t believe Alvin would confide to this cartoonish double act.  These bits expose the limitations of the script but they stick out only because the rhythm and preoccupations of most of The Straight Story are convincing.

Richard Farnsworth gives a fine, deeply felt performance as Alvin.  His ardent, fearful eyes are especially expressive.  Sissy Spacek gives Rose an extraordinary, rather disturbing vocal impediment:  her sympathetic playing makes almost too strong an impact in the early stages, particularly because Rose is more or less jettisoned from the narrative once her father leaves home.   The last few screen minutes of the journey, as man and mower inch towards their goal, are suspenseful.  The final meeting of Alvin and Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton) is moving, because of what it means to the characters and because of the nearly wordless eloquence of the two actors.  Lynch dedicates the picture to Alvin Straight, who died in 1996.  This was also the last screen appearance of Richard Farnsworth and it serves as a tribute to him too.  Farnsworth’s prostate cancer had metastatised by the time the film was in production; the hero’s difficulty in walking is also the actor’s.  Farnsworth took his own life in October 2000, a year after the release of The Straight Story.

20 September 2018

[1] According to the Wikipedia synopsis, the riders are taking part in the ‘Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa’.