Don't sleep on The Straight Story
If you want to watch David Lynch but you're a huge wuss like me, may I recommend this film about a man and his riding mower.
Roger Ebert hated David Lynch’s movies. He famously ripped apart Blue Velvet when every other critic declared it a surreal masterpiece; now, that old review is up on the David Lynch tribute page at RogerEbert.com, which celebrates Lynch as “one of the most important artists to ever live.” Ebert also did not care for Wild at Heart or Lost Highway and thought Dune was stupid (to be fair, most people thought Dune was stupid). I'm a good Chicago boy and I love Roger Ebert, but he certainly had his blind spots, and there are several hilarious examples of him missing the point of a movie completely. He once reviewed Look Who's Talking and thought it would be better without that annoying talking baby. WHAT DID YOU THINK THE MOVIE WAS ABOUT, ROGER.
Ebert eventually did come around on Lynch. Mulholland Dr. and Inland Empire both got perfect four-star reviews. But before those, he gave his first-ever positive review of a David Lynch film - another perfect and well-deserved four stars - to The Straight Story.
Everybody has been writing remembrances of Lynch - here’s one, here’s one, here’s one, all three of those are good - and I’m not the right guy to ask for a whole retrospective of what his career meant. Before Lynch died, the only part of his catalogue I’d seen was the original Twin Peaks and Mulholland Dr.. I couldn’t even follow Mulholland Dr., although of course that’s because it’s not a movie you “follow”. It was clear from Lynch’s public persona that despite the frequent darkness of his subject matter, he poured a remarkable amount of joy and earnestness into his work across media, from filmmaking to television writing to furniture making, and into his day-to-day life. And it was obvious to a younger Tony watching Mulholland Dr. that, even if I wasn’t “entertained” by this movie in a way I was expecting, the director was achieving something that nobody else could. I still think about the Winkie’s Diner scene, which is maybe the scariest scene I’ve ever seen in a film not because of what you see but because of the buzzing dread and anticipation that crushes you throughout the scene. It feels like having a nightmare; David Lynch knew exactly how to articulate something as illegible as “what a nightmare feels like” and turn it into an actual scene in an actual movie - a movie that was commercially successful and critically adored! He did this multiple times over a fifty year career! There is nobody else in the world who can do what he did, and we have suffered a tremendous loss for the arts this week.
At the time of this writing, I have not seen Eraserhead or Blue Velvet or Dune or Inland Empire, and while I am now planning to go back through all of those because they’re all up on streaming right now, the reason I haven’t seen those yet is simple: I am a wuss. Not only am I a guy who doesn’t like feeling as though he’s living in a nightmare when he’s trying to relax on the couch, but I’m not a smart guy when it comes to Appreciating Film. The only three movies I have seen in theaters since the pandemic started were Barbie, the Eras Tour movie, and Moana 2. I’m not good at recognizing the craft that goes into making any movie, much less something more on the expressionist or avant-garde side than I’m used to watching. There’s no part of me that is going to “kick back” and watch Eraserhead just on my next free evening, I’m going to have to be in the mood for that one and I’m scared to think of what that “mood” is going to have to be. But when Lynch passed away on Thursday, I wanted to watch something by the guy, and his one outlier, the G-rated film he made for the Walt Disney Company in 1999, was also up on streaming, and I said “maybe this will be life-affirming”, and it turns out that it was, so if you get a chance and would like to take a moment to remember one of the most important artists to ever live, maybe check out The Straight Story.
The Straight Story is true: in 1994, 73-year-old Alvin Straight really did go to visit his estranged brother 240 miles away, driving across Iowa and Wisconsin on a John Deere riding mower that tops out at five miles per hour, because he didn’t have a driver’s license. The trip took him six weeks. In Lynch’s film, Straight is captured by the veteran Western actor Richard Farnsworth, who gives an incredible performance that led to him becoming, at the time, the oldest man ever nominated for a Best Actor Oscar. Farnsworth’s portrayal of the taciturn Straight, a man who knows he’s near the end of his life and stubbornly determined to make this one last thing right and do it with dignity, is overwhelming and powerful even before you learn that Farnsworth was dying of cancer while he was shooting the film, cancer that had already spread to his bones and paralyzed his legs; Farnsworth took the role anyway because he was so impressed with Straight’s story, and this became his final role, one last big statement in his career that he executed with tremendous talent and dignity. Ebert wrote of the writing and acting that “[Straight] is not a sophisticated man, but when he speaks, the words come out like the bricks of a wall built to last. Like Hemingway’s dialogue, the screenplay by John Roach and Mary Sweeney finds poetry and truth in the exact choice of the right everyday words. Richard Farnsworth, who was 79 when he made the film, speaks the lines with perfect repose and conviction.”
All of that is true: this is a very beautiful and very understated film (Lynch’s decision on where and how to end the movie is even better than I could have hoped). It is, incredibly, still an unmistakably David Lynch film. You still have these slow-paced shots, these funny-looking old guys, the music by longtime Lynch collaborator Angelo Badalamenti, this dialogue that is somehow so direct and halting that it turns the corner and you realize that it’s far more realistic than most movie dialogue out there. This is very clearly a movie by the same guy who made Twin Peaks. Many of Lynch’s characters talk like cheerful dorks from the middle of nowhere (probably because Lynch was a cheerful dork from the middle of nowhere) and that tone and style usually creates a surreal dissonance with all the murder and nightmare fuel; in this movie, they actually are that cheerful, that dorky, and that in the middle of nowhere, but here they’re just being kind to the old man passing through on a Deere. The movie made me think about the people I love and what I’m going to care about as I get older and how beautiful the Midwest looks in the fall and how being alive is a good thing and I don’t want to die. It was, I think, a good way for a wuss like me to appreciate Lynch.
This is normally where I’d tie in the thing I really want to talk about to something else in Catholicism, but I don’t have anything. I just want you to know that I really liked this movie and I really am grateful for this man and his art, and all of us could use a good piece of art to nourish us when things are rough, so if you are at home this weekend hunkered down against -30 degree windchills like I will be, you can watch The Straight Story (which is currently streaming on Disney+) and feel good that we were once blessed with a guy who could make things that nobody else could and have one of those things be this.
In conclusion: DAMN GOOD COFFEE! AND HOT!