The Straight Story
David Lynch surprised many people in 1999 with this tender and moving road movie about an old man who travels hundreds of miles on a lawn mower to visit his sick brother.
The ‘master of weird’. The ‘czar or bizarre’. Nicknames that David Lynch earned with disturbing and surreal films such as ERASERHEAD and BLUE VELVET. That same David Lynch made THE STRAIGHT STORY in 1999, based on the true story of 73-year-old Alvin Straight. When he hears that his brother Lyle – whom he hadn’t spoken to for almost a decade – has had a stroke, he decides to visit him. He makes the trip from Iowa to Wisconsin on a John Deere lawn mower from 1966. As in any good road movie, it is not so much the physical, but the mental journey that counts. Lead actor Richard Farnsworth, who suffered from bone cancer during the shooting, deservedly received an Academy Award nomination for best actor. As a poignant coda, the actor took his own life a year after the film’s release.