Review: David Lynch’s The Straight Story on Limited Edition Imprint Blu-ray

The Straight Story receives a stellar release from Imprint that boasts a beautiful transfer and great slate of extras.

F9Roads in David Lynch’s films are unusually portentous. In Lost Highway, the road is a visual signifier of the film’s mobius-strip structure and rhyming narratives of guilt, violence, and betrayal. In Mulholland Drive, it’s the site of an amnesia-inducing car accident and a portal into the Hollywood Hills home in which a woman’s dreams are alternately made and shattered. And in Blue Velvet, Dennis Hopper’s Frank Booth takes to the road to deliver a terrifying monologue during which he threatens to send Kyle MacLachlan’s Jeffrey “straight to hell!” For Lynch, a flat swath of asphalt is a means of eerily signaling that his characters are about to arrive at a place of reckoning.

On the surface, Lynch’s 1999 film The Straight Story is a decidedly, well, straighter story than most of his other works. Where Lynch’s protagonists often find themselves on looping, circuitous routes to unknown realms, the soft-spoken yet exceedingly stubborn Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth) sets out on his beaten-down lawn tractor for a 240-mile redemptive pilgrimage from Iowa to Wisconsin to visit his ailing brother, Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton). But don’t let the film’s G rating and Disney banner fool you, as beneath Alvin’s placid smiles and Midwestern politeness lurks a hidden dimension of grief and sorrow that’s as devastating as that of any of Lynch’s doomed protagonists.

If Lost Highway was, in short, about a man’s unwillingness to reckon with his past sins, resulting in a psychic split once they start to catch up to him, The Straight Story is its more gentle mirror image. Alvin is a man tortured by his mistakes, and perhaps sensing that his death is around the corner, he’s only now starting to confront his demons, searching for the grace to forgive the brother he hasn’t seen or spoken to in over a decade, as well as himself. In a way, Alvin seeks to exit, rather than enter, the oblivion where many Lynch characters find themselves. And yet, the darkness and terror of a twisted soul and the beauty and tenderness of love are entwined here in ways that are common to Lynch’s work.

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During one of Alvin’s numerous overnight roadside pit stops, he sits by a crackling fire and tells a priest (John Lordan) the story of how his daughter, Rose (Sissy Spacek), lost custody of her four children to the state in the wake of a housefire. This tragedy casts a looming shadow over Rose’s simple, lonely life of caring for her aging father, and weighs heavily on Alvin as well. Fire appears frequently throughout the film, not only at the man’s nightly campsites, but in key scenes that suggest a reckoning to come for Alvin. Just before he loses control of his mower on a steep downhill stretch of road, he glimpses a house on fire on the side of the road. His vision blurs and though we see no flashback, the fire, as much as the hill, seems to cause him to lose all sense of the world around him. Like Laura Palmer, fire walks with Alvin too.

The Straight Story abounds in heart-wrenching scenes, such as a barside chat between Alvin and a fellow World War II veteran (Donald Weigert). As they swap war stories, both men’s voices are shaky and tears fill their eyes, suggesting that they haven’t spoken about these events for years, if ever before. Decades—nearly a lifetime—of pent-up anguish slowly begins to pour out of the typically reticent Alvin Straight. But what makes these occasional revelations so particularly moving is how Lynch carefully positions them throughout this delicate, leisurely paced film, which is dominated by silence and dialogue that’s often as frank as one could expect from the Midwesterners of which Lynch has always been so fond.

“What do you need that grabber for, Alvin?” a hardware store owner (Ed Grennan) asks him, to which Alvin simply replies, “Grabbin’.” This earnestness, comically tinged in ways that recall the exchanges between the folks of Twin Peaks, is the default mode of The Straight Story. With countless montages of gorgeous Midwest vistas, set to Angelo Badalamenti’s typically lush, melodic score, Lynch sets a contemplative mood and meticulous pacing that helps balance Alvin’s raw, deeply felt emotional pain with a pervasive sense of the sublime. This approach makes the film’s bittersweet ending all the more overwhelming. As the camera tilts upward to the stars in the final shot, Lynch has found not a distressing void, but something akin to eternity itself. It’s one of the great scenes in all of Lynch’s filmography, and it, like most of The Straight Story, is proof of his remarkable generosity and range as a filmmaker.

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Image/Sound

Imprint’s 1080p transfer from a restored 4k master looks gorgeous, with a high dynamic range and subtle color balancing that allows for the verdancy of greens and lush golden hues to really come through, while still retaining a naturalistic look, particularly in skin tones. The numerous fireside chats at night boast deep blacks and impressive detail throughout David Lynch’s meticulously framed compositions. The image is sharp, but has just enough grain to retain a film-like look and is free of any signs of debris. The Dolby Digital audio is also quite strong, with a robust mix that highlights Lynch’s typically layered, complex sound design as well as the earnest beauty of Angelo Badalamenti’s lilting score.

Extras

Although the disc offers a great-looking transfer, the extra features, including a commentary track with critic Peter Tonguette, more than justify the price. In his commentary, Tonguette addresses the mixed to negative critical response to Lynch’s previous two films, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me and Lost Highway, and how the unexpectedly sweet The Straight Story helped turn the critical tide back in his favor. He also uses Janet Maslin’s 1999 review as a frequent reference to analyze both how the film celebrates simple virtues and how Lynch’s style remains uncompromised even with material he didn’t write.

A new video essay by filmmaker, writer, and programmer Ian Mantgani makes a convincing case that The Straight Story isn’t an outlier in Lynch’s filmography. Drawing comparisons to many of Lynch’s films, Mantgani traces a line between their motifs and themes all the way to The Straight Story, and suggests that Lynch’s vision of Americana is far more nuanced and panoramic than many people give him credit for. The disc also comes with several other extras that touch on the film’s location scouting and Angelo Badalamenti’s score, as well as a behind-the-scenes featurette that speaks to Lynch’s striving for authentic Midwestern actors.

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Overall

David Lynch’s The Straight Story receives a stellar release from Imprint that boasts a beautiful transfer and great slate of extras.

Score: 
 Cast: Richard Farnsworth, Sissy Spacek, John Galloway Heitz, Joseph A. Carpenter, Donald Wiegert, Tracey Maloney, Dan Flannery, Everett McGill  Director: David Lynch  Screenwriter: John Roach, Mary Sweeney  Distributor: Imprint  Running Time: 112 min  Rating: G  Year: 1999  Release Date: September 15, 2021  Buy: Video

Derek Smith

Derek Smith's writing has appeared in Tiny Mix Tapes, Apollo Guide, and Cinematic Reflections.

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