Lawn ranger
David Lynch has mower meaning
by Peter Keough
Maybe the double meaning
ends with the title. David Lynch's latest shocker, the G-rated Disney movie
The
Straight Story, has elicited more controversy and praise than any of his
films since Blue Velvet. As plays on words go, this is a mild one: Lynch
seems to tell the story straight, and it's about a real-life character named
Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth, who will be remembered at Oscar time), a
73-year-old Iowa farmer who travels 370 miles to visit his ailing
septuagenarian brother Lyle (Henry Dean Stanton, who if they were giving out
Oscars for single scenes would get one) on a John Deere lawnmower. Daunted
perhaps by the possibility that life could come up with something weirder than
even he could imagine, Lynch relates the tale with an awe, innocence, and
simplicity that are not usually associated with the creator of Eraserhead
and Twin Peaks.
Those qualities, however, are the virtues of a voyeuristic boy scout: they
make Lynch's weirdness all the more disturbing and freight even his sunniest
moments with darker implications. That The Straight Story works as the
most moving and wholesome Hollywood family picture in ages doesn't make it any
less powerful as an ambiguous myth about mortality, guilt, and redemption. And
vice versa.
From the opening scene it's clear that Story takes place in the David
Lynch universe. The image of a starry night sky fades into a crane shot of a
lawn, a big woman on a chaise longue, and a window in a weathered bungalow. The
loud thud and outcry of a falling person comes from inside. It's a variation on
the opening to Blue Velvet, which begins with a cloudless sunny sky
fading to the image of a older man watering his suburban lawn and collapsing
from a stroke. This time, though, the fall is not followed by Blue
Velvet's bizarre zoom shot into the grass and a close-up of battling bugs.
Instead, we are shown fields of grain from higher and higher above rippling in
the autumn dusk by the roadside, ripe for harvest.
As is Alvin Straight, the unfortunate codger prostrate on the kitchen floor.
Dragged by his "slow" daughter Rose (Sissy Spacek, in a small gem of a
performance) to a clinic, Alvin is diagnosed with a host of maladies including
arthritic hips and a bad heart, but he refuses any treatment other than taking
on a second cane. Feeling cocky, he jump-starts his old John Deere to mow his
lawn. But a thunderstorm (mirrored beautifully in the faces of Alvin and Rose;
in this and other scenes Lynch's use of sound is masterful) and a phone call
interrupt. Alvin's brother Lyle (Henry Dean Stanton), from whom he's been
estranged for years, has fallen too. A stroke has landed him in the hospital.
These details are murmured off screen; what is shown is Alvin's reaction,
which mirrors a lifetime of conflict, bad behavior, and worse decisions
remembered, and a new direction resolved. His eyes too bad to let him drive a
car, his disposition too ornery to let him ride a bus, he slaps together a
trailer, hooks it to his mower, and heads off down the breakdown lane for a
long overdue reconciliation.
The route is an easy-going Bunyanesque allegory, as Alvin encounters various
obstacles -- the first mower breaks down, as does the second -- and folks,
almost all nice and helpful, along the way to the Mississippi River and the
town of Mt. Zion on the other side. The Freddie Francis cinematography is just
this side of Days of Heaven, and the acting is as flat and seemly as the
Midwestern accents and vistas. Unlike Blue Velvet, though, where such
pleasing surfaces concealed demonic depths, here angelic faces seem to lie
beneath the Norman Rockwell masks.
Or do they? Some of those Alvin meets on his pilgrimage have the uneasy aura
of long-buried ghosts. Like the pregnant runaway girl whom he comforts with
wieners and counsels with his parable about a family being like a bundle of
sticks tied together -- stronger bound together than each stick alone (is Alvin
or Lynch aware that this is also the emblem of fascism?). Or the old-timer with
whom he shares long-repressed memories of World War II, or the twin mechanics
(Kevin and John Farley) who take time out from cheating him on a repair bill to
squabble with each other.
What Alvin and Lyle squabbled about is never specified, but bit by bit
questions about Alvin's past emerge that belie his mien of crotchety wisdom and
benignity. When did he quit drinking? What happened to his wife, his other
kids? One suspects he was not a model father, husband, or brother. The stuff of
another David Lynch movie, perhaps, one beneath the freshly harvested fields
seen from the starry skies of The Straight Story.