By Mike Clark, USA TODAY
David Lynch directing a G-rated movie for Disney sounds as outrageous as, say, Oliver Stone directing a vintage MGM musical - the difference being that we now know Lynch can pull off the challenge.
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4 out of four Starring: Richard Farnsworth, Sissy Spacek, Harry Dean Stanton Director: David Lynch Distributor: Disney Rating: G |
The Straight Story is going to be revered for giving 79-year-old
Richard Farnsworth the role of his career. But the most amazing thing about this
fact-based yarn is that it actually plays like movies we're accustomed to seeing
from the filmmaker behind Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks.
Lynch has a way of finding drama in the most mundane small-town events, and here
he recounts a six-week saga that, though hardly mundane, might have been treated
with satire or condescension by someone else. The title is a play on words
because it concerns the late Alvin Straight (Farnsworth) - a widowed veteran and
father of 14 who in 1994 drove a 28-year-old John Deere riding mower from
Laurens, Iowa, to Mount Zion, Wis.
The movie gradually massages viewers out of any initial antagonism ("Get
off the road, you addled idiot") into a rooting concern for
Alvin's goal.
It isn't just that, with poor eyesight and no driver's license, he's trying to
visit a stroke-afflicted brother he hasn't spoken to in 10 years by the only
means at his disposal. It's also that his past boozing and vanity contributed to
the sibling fissure - one of many things we learn about Alvin as he chums up to
strangers on the road in a series of warm and perfectly weighted vignettes.
The movie gets its emotional force from Lynch's directorial passion, wise script
(John Roach, Mary Sweeney) and Farnsworth - the one-time stunt man who came out
of acting nowhere to get a supporting Oscar nomination for 1978's Comes a
Horseman, a feat likely to be repeated with Straight.
Sissy Spacek plays Alvin's semibefuddled daughter, and she, too, has her story -
one that, like so many of the plot revelations, resonates long after the movie
has ended.
Lynch finds a way to get visual mileage out of virtually every scene, as when a
brake mishap on a hill ends with a miraculously unharmed Alvin making a chance
screech-halt in front of an eyesore structure that the local fire department is
torching as an exercise.
The filmmaker's instincts have never been sharper, but it's also welcome to see
Lynch indulging a humanistic streak not really displayed since 1980's The
Elephant Man.
The result may be the best news the G rating has had since the ratings system
was instituted in 1968.