The Straight Story

Mary Sweeney read about Alvin Straight’s lawnmower journey in The New York Times in the summer of 1994 and wrote the script with her childhood friend John Roach; the two drove the route themselves while working on it. David Lynch shot it with the same discipline. Production ran through the autumn of 1998 along the road Straight actually took, the scenes filmed in the order the script places them. Straight’s own house stood in for Alvin’s, and some of the townspeople were his real neighbours. Richard Farnsworth took the part while his cancer was spreading to his bones; the leg paralysis on screen is not acting. Lynch later called this his most experimental movie; the MPAA gave it a G, the only Lynch film to carry one. Farnsworth was nominated for Best Actor at the 72nd Academy Awards, where Kevin Spacey won; at that point he was the oldest nominee the category had seen. He took Best Male Lead at the Independent Spirit Awards, and the New York Film Critics Circle honoured him and cinematographer Freddie Francis. A good fit if you take 240 miles at 5 miles an hour as the measure of the film rather than a lull in it. Not for anyone waiting on Lynch’s dream logic and dread; the telling here is flat and chronological.