The Straight Story (1999) is a movie. It has Richard Farnsworth in it. It was great.
In honor of the passing of David Lynch I decided to watch a film that I had first heard of the year before it had come out, so we went to Disney+ and watched The Straight Story. It centers around an older man named Alvin Straight who wants to visit his brother following a stroke to make amends before his brother passes.
Alvin, himself, has health issues as he struggles to see due to diabetes and also has issues with his hips that practically make him immobile. Because of his problems with his vision he no longer has a drivers license. This is compounded by the fact that his brother lives in Blue River Wisconsin and Alvin lives in Laurens, Iowa.
He doesn’t trust a bus to take him 247 miles so he decided to make the trek he would drive himself on a riding lawnmower while pulling a trailer with food and other necessities to help him set up camp on the side of the highway. Along the way he encounters multiple issues with the riding mower that involves extensive repairs but also an opportunity to meet many different people along the way. The film is based on a true story, which makes the film even more intersecting, especially when directed by a man known for his more surreal storytelling.
There’s so much I love about this film. The performance by Farnsworth as Alvin is one of the best performances I’ve seen done by an actor. As someone who grew up in Iowa and is very familiar with the smaller areas of the state he pulls off playing an old stubborn man from small town Iowa perfectly. My grandfather owned a farm just outside of Oxford, Iowa, a town of 300 people or so, and the way Alvin stubbornly carries himself is so familiar and even the way he delivers the lines is exactly what I’d expect from someone from that area. I was surprised when I looked up Richard Farnsworth and saw that he wasn’t from any Midwest state.
But it’s not just the way he acts like a rural Iowa, it’s also the subtle looks of contemplative sadness he shows as he rides the tractor or how he shows his concern for his mortality without ever once talking about it in the film. Unfortunately, Farnsworth was going through some real life troubles as he performed this character as he was dealing with a terminal illness at the time of filming and ultimately ended up taking his own life not too long after being in this film.
The other characters he comes across in this film are what drives the story, however. There are aspects of it that remind of Fargo where it’s not quite clear if the rural Midwesterners are being made fun of for their simplicity and their quirks but on that token, even with the humor that seems to be poking fun at them there’s also an admiration for the people as they are willing to help Alvin in his journey even though they realize what he is doing is quite strange.
The music in this film creates an overarching feeling of sadness, especially when combined with Farnsworth’s performance (knowing Farnsworth’s fate in real life didn’t help that experience either) but I’m impressed with how this film was able to create a tone of sadness in such a subtle way that isn’t overly sentimental but in a way that’s real. It was a film that made me tear up but never burst into tears but at times it made me smile because in a lot of ways it did remind me of home and the characters felt so familiar to me.
There are other gorgeous shots of the landscape in this film as well. I think it gets stuck in a lot of people’s minds that Iowa is just flat cornfields and while it is a lot of cornfields there are definitely parts of the state that are more hilly and different uses of the camera, including a lot of use of a helicopter (I assume, at times it looked like a drone but this was in 1999) really bring out the beauty in the farmland and helps to bring more life to the journey.
My only real complaints regarding the film pretty much rest in one scene where Alvin comes across a woman who hits an deer and states that she has hit something to the effect of 11 deer on the same road and keeps doing it over and over again. I do not think that is based off a real event (of course I could be wrong) but I used to rent cars as a job and when living in Iowa I knew plenty of people who hit a deer and cars don’t handle smacking a deer very well, let alone that many. It was a weird scene to include in the film and felt more at home in something like Twin Peaks. Some of the shots revolving around Alvin seeing her make impact with the deer were a little odd and out of place as well but with all that said considering it was a film about him coming across all kind of different people and how Alvin interacts with those people…..it didn’t take me out of the film by any means. It almost felt like the film didn’t have enough David Lynch in it and needed to have at least one scene that felt like a David Lynch movie.
But aside from that one scene (which I didn’t even hate, I just felt it was out of place) I loved this film. It captured exactly what I want in a film centered around rural Iowa but it’s about more than that. It captures the emotion of the moment so wonderfully and I have a hard time letting the images Richard Farnsworth’s contemplative look as he drives the mower out of my head.
