Film

The Straight Story

Name: The Straight Story
Genre: Drama, Adventure
Released: 1999
Cast: Richard Farnsworth, Sissy Spacek, Jane Galloway Heitz, Joseph A. Carpenter, Donald Wiegert

David Lynch working almost entirely against type: no surrealism, no dread, just an old man driving a lawnmower across two states to make peace with his dying brother. Farnsworth's performance is plain and enormous, and the film is slow, generous, and moved by ordinary kindness. For anyone who thinks Lynch only does nightmares, this is the gentle corrective.

TMDb rating

7.7

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But Black-and-white and bone-dry; if you need warmth up front rather than earned slowly, it can feel chilly.

About Schmidt2002

Jack Nicholson's retired actuary hits the road in an RV, furious and grieving and funny about it, on a journey that starts as spite and ends somewhere gentler.

But Schmidt is prickly and self-pitying in ways Alvin never is — more comic irritation than serenity.

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Robert Redford's last screen role, playing a career bank robber who is, somehow, one of the most charming men alive. It shares Alvin's unhurried faith in decency, just pointed at crime.

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The Shootist1976

Both films are, unusually, dying men's stories told through dying (or nearly dying) actors — Farnsworth was terminally ill during Straight Story's shoot, much as Wayne was during his. Both trade Alvin's or Wayne's real screen legend for quiet, unsentimental confrontations with mortality rather than melodrama.

John Wayne's actual last film, playing an aging gunfighter dying of cancer who wants to choose the manner of his own end — shot while Wayne himself was ill. Same unsentimental dignity, aimed at death instead of reconciliation.

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A real New Zealander in his sixties builds a motorcycle in his shed and rides it to Utah to break a land-speed record. Same stubborn old-man logic, same trust in strangers along the way.

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An elderly widower and his cat cross America after being evicted from his New York apartment, meeting the country one small kindness at a time. Art Carney won an Oscar for it.

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A slow, decades-long friendship built on patience and small daily proof rather than declarations — the same faith that goodness accumulates quietly, given time.

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Lars and the Real Girl2007

A small Midwestern town closes ranks around a man everyone privately thinks is strange, and treats him with total, straight-faced kindness anyway. The same unembarrassed decency runs through both films.

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A River Runs Through It1992no page yet

Robert Redford's elegy for two brothers and the Montana river between them, told with the same reverence for landscape and quiet regret over family bonds left too long unattended.

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Sling Blade1996

Billy Bob Thornton's gentle, damaged ex-convict finds unlikely welcome in a small town, and the film shares Alvin's patience with people others write off too quickly.

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Make Way for Tomorrow1937

Both refuse to sentimentalize old age or supply a villain to blame; both simply let the ordinary indignities and quiet dignities of being elderly and inconvenient play out onscreen, asking what a family actually owes its elders.

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Sherman's March1986

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A documentary that sets out to retrace Sherman's Civil War march and instead becomes a rambling, funny, unexpectedly moving meditation on love, loneliness and nuclear anxiety, one stranger's porch at a time.

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