Famously, The Straight Story is David Lynch’s wholesome departure project, though the director described it as his “most experimental movie” in 2001, second to Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, released in 1992. This is slightly puzzling. Numerous words describe the film – elegiac, folksy, contemplative – but experimental isn’t an obvious choice. If there had to be just one, it would be understated.
Lynch’s account of Alvin Straight — a 73-year-old veteran who drove 240 miles on a lawn mower to visit his ailing brother — avoids melodrama at every opportunity. The film was ripe for treacle and sentiment, and audiences would have likely rewarded it at the box office. Instead, Lynch suspends emotional range, spreading it modestly and allowing small, authentic exchanges to speak for themselves, free of manipulative oversight.
This is fitting for Alvin Straight, whom screenwriter Mary Sweeney described as “a stoic, non-verbal, stubborn, idiosyncratic American character.” Actor and former stuntman Richard Farnsworth is cast perfectly as Straight, delivering a sublimely natural performance that skews terse but is always warm, polite, and, on occasion, very powerful. There are decades of feeling in his weathered face and glassy eyes, namely a wistful sense of reflection and mortality. Farnsworth is never actorly or cynical. He played it perfectly because he wasn’t playing — he had terminal cancer.
Of Straight’s encounters on his journey from Iowa to Wisconsin, his most powerful is a barroom exchange with Lyle (Wiley Harker), a fellow WWII veteran. Their accounts are humble, harrowing, and almost hypnotically intense, owing to close-up framing, ambient sound design, and superlative naturalism. The scene typifies the film’s aversion to all things cloying, cliched and trite. However, it arguably marks the emotional peak of a film that’s as measured as the Iowa plains. In other words, The Straight Story is understated to a fault — but it’s still an easy candidate for a 4K remaster.
StudioCanal’s restoration is a pleasure, with strong colours, tasteful grading, and a clean, stable image. There is a solid suite of extras, too, including interviews with David Lynch and a lengthy behind-the-scenes documentary.
