When Alvin Straight, the elderly hero of The Straight Story, hobbles for shelter during the 300-mile journey he’s making on his rider-mower, a concerned housewife expresses kindly concern that Alvin’s sleeping in the open: ”There’s a lot of weird people out there …”
Well yes, ma’am, there sure is, and one of them is – or was – the director of this very movie: David Lynch, one of the weirdest of them all, the prince of weird, the laureate of weird these 20 years.
He is a man for whom a hazardous road journey across the American mid-west must surely mean dark and mysterious disclosures, dazed and bloodied co-eds staggering across the highway at night, misshapen creatures in motels, sexually atypical encounters with all the trolls and nymphs with whom Mr Lynch is wont to populate his mental forest.
But The Straight Story isn’t like this. It delivers exactly what it promises: a straight story, un-deceptively straight, taken from real life, about a 73-year-old man, Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth), who leaves his grown-up daughter Rose (Sissy Spacek) to make a long road journey from Iowa to Wisconsin on his John Deere rider-mower because he can’t drive or afford a bus. All this to see his brother Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton) just once more, before one of them dies.
That’s it. What you’ve got on the label is what you’ve got in the can. Alvin takes no detours into the bizarre or the grotesque – indeed, Lynch deploys the vast, featureless prairie of Iowa cornfield either side of Alvin’s dogged, chugging machine almost to show there is simply no cover for any lurking forces. And there is no travelling at night.
Alvin runs into many people on his down-home odyssey: a pregnant runaway, a well-wishing couple, a clergyman, two bickering (but non-weird) twins, all of whom either help him or gratefully receive his wise homilies about the importance of family. The Straight Story is a simple, moving hymn to ordinary human decency, to the tenacity of innocence and civic values in the mid-west, to the dignity of the old, and, perhaps most emphatically of all, to the John Deere mower company – the symbol of American craftsmanship and farming frontier spirit.
Now that Starbucks and even Gatorade have become common-currency brand names in Britain, John Deere is perhaps the only really gigantic American commercial icon that has yet to invade. And yet it is such a household term in the US. (PJ O’Rourke has an essay somewhere about a farm worker who’s worn his John Deere cap so long outdoors ploughing that the sunburn is lasered into his neck around the shape of his headgear.) That John Deere mower, basically reliable and dependable, carries old Alvin along the landscape reeeal slooow: at a horseman’s trot. One of Lynch’s most inspired shots is simply one of the Iowa blacktop as Alvin trundles along: not whizzing down past us, as in a sexy road movie, but with laid-back slowness, to the wheezing country fiddles of Angelo Badalamenti’s score. The grain of the asphalt is perfectly visible. Lynch then pans up at the sky, holds it there for a few moments, and then serenely pans down again, and though we might expect Alvin to be a speck on the horizon by now, he’s only got about 30 yards.
The contrast with the frenetic, unhappy pace of the automobile is obvious, and at one stage Alvin chances upon a shrieking, stressed-out driver who has just run into a deer – naturally, the symbol of the John Deere company. In his Deere mower, Lynch has found a seriocomic vision of innocent American locomotion, a world away from the fast and flashy world of cars, in whose industry America has long since lost its dominance.
What is also distinctive about The Straight Story is its unapologetic focus on old people – traditionally marginalised and invisible in commercial cinema. Farnsworth wears his oldness with enormous pride and dignity, quite unimpaired by having to appear semi-naked in the unforgiving light of a doctor’s surgery. And Sissy Spacek is now drawn and haggard-looking, the lines of age adding to her habitual gauntness, but her face is even more compelling, gazing sadly out of her window at the rain like something from a Russian drama.
The Straight Story has a virile, persuasive quality drawn from its sobriety and unadornedness, although there is a pinch or three of sugar in the mix. Where it is confusing is what it implies about Lynch’s back catalogue. This picture is about precisely the sort of wholesome folk in whom there used to be a dark secret. Now there is no dark secret, but clearly Lynch does not believe himself to be simply traversing a surface, leaving unexamined any wacky or sinister reality beneath.
The goodness of The Straight Story is intended to have authenticity and substance; it is not some questionable Dr Jekyll we’re looking at. But if this is ”straight”, it is difficult not to think of his former work as, in some way, immature or invalid. The movie’s position in Lynch’s corpus of work raises questions but, on its own terms, it has a marvellous simplicity and candour, blessed with a wonderful performance from Richard Farnsworth: a thoroughly satisfying and affecting piece of work.