THE STRAIGHT STORY (1999)

Cinephiles love signalling to other filmgoers how they lionise David Lynch and his eccentric style and horrific imageries in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992), Lost Highway (1997), and Mulholland Drive (2001). Yet reading into the man himself, it becomes clear that his more personal, humanistic films are just as close, if not far closer, to his heart and psyche. Reading how once in his youth he encountered a naked grown woman, who seemed to have been abused sexually, crying in public, how it made a distressing sight for the young boy, and making the connection with Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet (1986), which the press had perceived (unfairly) and lambasted as maltreatment or even exploitation on his part, you sense how he was only trying to act against his instinct to suppress his trauma by bringing it to the fore, dealing with it on his own turf.

For all his stylized violence and dreamlike eeriness, what distinguishes Lynch from the likes of Quentin Tarantino and Eli Roth is his personal and psychological relationship to his art, and from the likes of Abel Ferrara and David Cronenberg his almost matchless sensibility for what Susan Sontag called “pure, untranslatable, sensuous immediacy” in the movie images. In Eraserhead (1977), he transliterates his nocturnally depressive experience living in the industrial, crime-ridden shadow of Philadelphia, and his ambivalent fear of sex and parenthood, into a queer, droning, noirish nightmare. The image of a trad-blonde with a swollen, deformed face doing a 50s pop number, or a slimy alien baby in a seemingly perpetual state of crying and sickness, or its eventual fate of infanticide by its father Henry (Jack Nance), or Henry’s Afro-pompadour-hairstyled head falling off and being processed in a factory to be used like an eraser, or his adulterous sex with his lady neighbour as they drown into the bed of fluid, stays with you long after you’ve recovered from the experience of seeing them.

When Mel Brooks handed him the baton to direct the biopic of John Merrick—The Elephant Man (1980)—he didn’t do what a lesser director would almost certainly have done: to present his freakishly deformed subject, played laboriously in bulky makeup by John Hurt, from the same exploitative angle of the freak show consumers and distanced outsiders as the voyeuristic filmgoers. Instead, Merrick’s appearance, initially covered in the darkness of Victorian London and his white hood, was uncovered for us only little at a time as we gain a deeper understanding of his existential plight; with each revelation so carefully and strategically framed, the film is deeply concerned with the ethics of its presentation that by comparison, Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993) seem only a condescending mockery of it. Today, only Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell (2012) and Women Talking (2022) seem to have the same discernibly unironic, social self-awareness.

It’s in what a direct, distanced view of Merrick’s body could never convey or evoke that the silent tears on Frederick Treves’s naturally dazed look could. By the time we see Merrick for who he appears to be, we’re ready to move on from our disgust and amazement and see past the lumpy deformities for the human that’s trapped inside. We respond so strongly to his pain that we can’t bear something so much as a group of drunken rubbernecks breaking into his room and humiliating him. And it’s only fitting that we hear Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings” when he bids farewell to the world: its unadulterated, elegiac beauty doesn’t feel at all like a juxtaposition with Merrick’s superficial monstrosity.

Lynch must’ve felt the same compassion for Alvin Straight as he did for Merrick when he came upon his story: of a man in his early seventies who travelled hundreds of miles from Laurens, Iowa to Blue River, Wisconsin on a lawn mower to visit his ailing brother in 1994. Played gracefully by Richard Farnsworth, Alvin is a chain-smoking oldster who walks on two canes. He spits out words in a heartland twang without a hint of parody, looks up at you in the same perturbed eyes you remember on your own grandfather, mows the grass with a worn flannel shirt, a cream-yellow cowboy hat, and a breast pocket full of Swisher Sweets. Rose (Sissy Spacek), his birdhouse maker daughter who has got a sharp declarative memory for dates and facts but stutters (blocks) every two syllables, is his only companion. Learning of the news that his brother Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton) had a stroke, he sets out on his trip despite everyone’s advice, and the rest is history.

The screenplay, by Mary Sweeney and John Roach, has such a simplicity of emotion that Lynch, who knew Sweeney as a partner but had expressed little interest in her material, was so swept up in its radiance reading it and eventually agreed to direct it. Shot in chronological order, you can almost feel the seasons mellowing with time, as the landscapes modestly grow a fuzzy glow of red and yellow, like the patches of pink you grow on your skin when you age. Yet Alvin doesn’t explain when he says to a company of young cyclists: “The worst part about being old is rememberin’ when you was young.” The best biopics learn restraint by providing only a scattershot. It’s in the belief that a simple expression or event can convey more depth of feeling than an obituary essay. By holding back, we see and identify with a man of longing and regrets without knowing his full story.

Wim Wenders strode for a similar effect in Perfect Days (2023), but despite Kōji Yakusho’s effort his main character doesn’t have the same texture and wear. Where The Straight Story lets out little hints and anecdotes of Alvin’s experience of life, Perfect Days merely wants you to assume it. We’re not to romanticize Alvin exactly, like how we’re supposed to view Wenders’ idealistic distillation of himself in a similar light as how we do the nameless, selfless heroes in fairy tales. When Yakusho’s character cries meeting his estranged sister, we’re not sure why or in what emotional context he sheds his tears, just a vague hint at a different time and a different personality. By contrast, Alvin’s admission to a fellow veteran that he had accidentally taken one of his comrades’ life in a fearful, confusing exchange of fire during World War II, or his revelation to a runaway kid of Rose’s sorrows over having lost custody of her children for an accident she was not responsible for, has a raw yet understated power of sentiment, that sense of confusion and buried emotions of everyday life, that to draw meaningful comparisons one searches beyond the medium.

What drew Lynch’s sympathy for Alvin must also have been his rugged individualism. Speaking for myself, the simple act of growing old has its sort of valour. It’s hard not to contemplate when a loved one of yours passes away, or when they stop being the person you knew your whole life, that one day the same fate that befell them would befall you; and when it’s time it would be your loved ones who share the burden for you, and pick up the pieces after you. One may question Alvin’s sanity when he decides to travel in the mode of transport that he did, but it’s really no more a willingness for risk than when you learn to toddle or when a bird learns to fly. It’s not borne out of vanity, or nostalgia, or romantic appeal, but simply his way of telling Lyle, his estranged brother whom he hasn’t met or spoken with in a decade, that he’s willing to put his whole life on the line for him. And it’s checkmate for Lyle, who can’t fall back on old disputes and excuses. The real Alvin died two years later after making the trip.

Freddie Francis, who also shot The Elephant Man and Dune (1984), gives the countryside an idyllic allure that celebrates earthly beauty. His slow zooms and movement reveal something that the best Robert Altman films had: a poetic naturalism that seems to have evolved from the aesthetic subjectivity of the documentary. Typical fans may find the literalness of both The Elephant Man and The Straight Story—that lack of surrealistic mystique and interpretability—inferior to the batshit craziness of his other works. Typical cinephilic myopia, they mistake fecundity for art.

The film could as easily as well be on par with a TV melodrama, but whenever it does seem like it’s gonna preach, it does exactly the opposite to get across the same message. To convince the runaway girl of the irreplaceable bond that is family, or when suggesting that a twin of mechanics cherish their time together instead of using it to fight each other, Alvin simply has to draw from his own experience. Like The Elephant Man, the melodrama here has not so much the Sirkian or Spielbergian moral high ground, but simply what critic James Agee once called “the humanistic attitude”. Our distance with the characters narrows not because they’re one step closer to ‘larger than life’, but precisely the opposite. We see ourselves in them.

UK • FRANCE • USA | 1999 | 112 MINUTES | 2.39:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: David Lynch.
writers: John Roach & Mary Sweeney.
starring: Richard Farnsworth, Sissy Spacek, Harry Dean Stanton, Everett McGill, John Farley & Kevin Farley.