The Straight Story

Google Maps turns out to assume a walking speed of three miles an hour, which is actually a bit slower than the real-life Alvin Straight’s average speed when he took his riding lawnmower to visit his brother. Google Maps calculates that, if you walked constantly, it should take you just shy of five days to get from Laurens, Iowa, to Mount Zion, Wisconsin. They do calculate a bit based on slopes, but not for things like simply being tired. Not that it would’ve affected Alvin Straight’s lawnmower, but it’s still interesting to consider. Not, of course, that Alvin Straight was capable of walking that distance.

In 1994, Alvin (Richard Farnsworth) was 74. He had diabetes and his doctor suspected he had emphysema. He was having trouble walking, and he was going blind. He lived with his daughter, Rose (Sissy Spacek), who was herself disabled in some way. Alvin had been estranged from his brother, Lyle (Henry Dean Stanton), for ten years, but the word comes to him that Lyle has had a stroke. He decides that he needs to visit Lyle. But he can’t drive. Neither can Rose. There is, clearly, only one solution to the problem.

The first time I watched this movie, it was with my partner, who didn’t believe me when I told him it was directed by David Lynch. Then, Alvin’s mower breaks down and he gets a ride to the Grotto of the Redemption on a bus full of pilgrims, and my partner said, “Oh, I see it now.” And it is true that this movie is not what we think of as Lynchian. However, when I wrote my obituary of him, one of the things I mentioned was Lynch’s connection to people, and that shines. Alvin could so easily be a caricature or a framing device for wacky people he meets on his journey, and he is neither.

Not that I know what the real Alvin Straight was like. I’m referring to the characters by first name, because otherwise we’d have three characters all with the same name—possibly; Rose was married, I believe, but her last name is never clear—but the movie is, after all, based on a true story. Alvin Straight died before it was made, but we also know that he’s someone who consistently resisted fame. He said that’s not why he did that, which is fair enough. Still, he had to have known, right? Like, man rides lawnmower for 240 miles and six weeks; man becomes famous. It’s kind of a direct path.

In casting Richard Farnsworth in the role, however, Lynch managed to resist making Alvin into anything other than a man with a goal in life and a lot of regrets. He meets any number of people on his journey. And mostly he simply talks. He talks to the young hitchhiker, Crystal (Anastasia Webb), who is afraid because she is pregnant. He talks to the bike-riders. He talks to the woman who keeps hitting deer with her car (Barbara Robertson). He talks to Danny (James Cada), in whose yard he camps when the mower breaks down. He talks to Verlyn Heller (Wiley Harker), a fellow World War II veteran who takes him to a bar. He talks to a priest (John Lordan) and to the twins (John and Kevin P. Farley, Chris’s brothers) who fix his mower. And we learn not just about Alvin but about the people he meets, and they are all human.

I mean, look, there’s a reason this is Lynch’s only G-rated movie. And, with all the love in my heart for both men, the only Lynch movie Roger Ebert gave a positive rating to. (Four stars out of four!) And there’s a reason it’s on Disney+. Namely that this is, yes, a Disney movie. Farnsworth had apparently seen Blue Velvet and didn’t like the language in it, and he had to have several assurances that there would be no swearing in this movie before he would agree to star in it. It debuted at Cannes, and Peter Schneider, who was then president of production for Disney, knew he had to acquire it for the company.

The movie is lovely. Of course it is. Lynch was capable of making incredibly lovely movies. Iowa is, perhaps, not the most sweeping of landscapes. There’s a lot of corn. It’s only as Alvin crosses the Mississippi River and into Wisconsin that the scenery gets more varied. Still, it’s filmed so beautifully that it’s hard to care. The camera also lingers on Farnsworth’s face, showing the age and experience there, the emotion when he tells stories of the past. Lynch knew what he was doing.

This is, I suppose, the Lynch film for people who don’t like David Lynch movies. It’s a quiet, simple story. We do get one brief moment to remind us of his other work, when Everett McGill shows up as a John Deere salesman (Big Ed’s Tractor Farm?), but that’s not really what the movie is. It’s not Lynchian in the way people think of Lynchian. There are a few moments—the cyclists passing Alvin; the moment where Alvin shoots his old mower and sets it on fire—but mostly, it’s quiet and gentle and human. One of the great aspects of David Lynch was, after all, how much he understood people.