Here is David Lynch’s fascinating and touching outlier movie from 1999, a gentle story told straight, without the exotic kinks and creepy asymmetries that we had come to expect and to which the director returned immediately afterwards. The movie was itself a diversion from the straight line of his habitual style. Screenwriters John Roach and Mary Sweeney (the latter a longtime Lynch collaborator and his ex-wife) adapted the true story of Alvin Straight who, in his 70s and in poor health, travelled more than 200 miles on a John Deere rider-mower from Iowa to Wisconsin to visit his ailing elder brother. Richard Farnsworth plays Alvin; Harry Dean Stanton plays his brother in cameo and Sissy Spacek plays his (fictionalised) daughter Rose.
It’s a film that presents us with the midwest decency, the picket fences and the open road that are all familiar enough from other Lynch films but without the roilingly surreal, subterranean weirdness beneath. Where Lynch usually presents stolid all-American ordinariness as the prelude to, or the surface part, of a larger dream-state, or nightmare-state, here the story of regular folks is all that there is. It’s normality all the way down. (One concerned bystander asks Alvin if he isn’t worried about the danger in solo travel: “There’s a lot of weird people around.” Not in this film there isn’t.)
