Critics reviews

This is a film about moving slowly and gently in a hard and fast world and, as others have observed, in this respect it’s akin to the films of Yasujirō Ozu. Like many of Ozu’s movies, The Straight Story quietly charts the pains of time’s passing and what the idea of a family means in both its potential for joy and for sorrow.

At a time when it is difficult to feel much affection for small-town America or its inhabitants, it is worth seeking out Lynch’s celebratory ode to the rural Midwest... If "About Schmidt," another road movie about a man of a certain age, was about misanthropy, "The Straight Story" is a celebration of the human spirit.

There are few films from the decade that felt more expansive and complex. In its elegant, unhurried relating of the true tale of Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth), a septuagenarian who traveled 240 miles by tractor to visit his sick, estranged brother, it happens naturally upon the kinds of eccentricities and bold visions on which Lynch's art has been staked, but in a way that finally revealed them to me not as mannerisms but as manifestations of a curious, generous nature.

That ["The Straight Story"] isn’t saccharine is almost entirely down to [Richard] Farnsworth’s resigned, frail presence, which never turns into that ‘feistiness’ Hollywood usually requires of old people.

In some ways it's a less personal work than Eraserhead because Lynch didn't write it, and it appears that the script was developed mainly without his input. Nevertheless this film represents a clear desire for renewal in a career that has stalled because Lynch has relied too heavily on tropes associated with noir and sexual decadence.

Prince of weirdness David Lynch always was a closet cultural conservative, and his new movie, The Straight Story, is Disney material with a vengeance. Dramatizing the true story of Alvin Straight, Lynch revels in a premise so shamelessly feel-good and absurdly family-friendly it might embarrass Steven Spielberg or Kevin Costner.

Except for a few interludes along the way, the director distances himself from the eeriness and darkness that has distinguished his best work, including "Eraserhead," "The Elephant Man" and "Blue Velvet," as well as his last feature, "Lost Highway," a turgid road movie with no map. In doing so, he has made the most deeply affecting film of his career -- how's that for a neat irony? -- and given audiences a gift of enduring beauty.

Despite its gee-whiz dialogue, the film can’t live without classic Lynch oddities like sinister grain silos, an overweight sunbather carefully eating pink Sno Balls, and a woman who seems primed to set a local record for number of deer hit by a single driver. There’s nothing wrong with touches like these--Lynch used them brilliantly in “Blue Velvet"--but they clash with, rather than enhance, the kind of feeling Farnsworth is working so hard to convey.

The movie isn't just about the old Alvin Straight's odyssey through the sleepy towns and rural districts of the Midwest, but about the people he finds to listen and care for him. You'd think it was a fantasy, this kindness of strangers, if the movie weren't based on a true story.

The chasm between the ghoulish malevolence of the filmmaker's previous "Lost Highway" and the decent, forthright tone of "The Straight Story" is almost too huge to fathom. But the same bellwether quality that left "Blue Velvet" looking so prescient, and ushered in a whole cinematic wave of taboo-shattering, is at work once again. When a born unnaturalist like Lynch can bring such interest and emotion to one man's simple story, the realm of the ordinary starts looking like a new frontier.

It’s almost irrelevant that “Straight Story” is based on actual events; Lynch has made a visionary film that ranks up there with his finest work, “Eraserhead” and “Blue Velvet.” A lyrical poem to America’s vast land and country folks, new pic is almost the opposite of Lynch’s explorations of sleazy urban milieus.

Though a radical departure in his career, not a minute of "The Straight Story" could be mistaken for another director's work. Scenes that might have been too conventional in other hands are graced by hallmark Lynchian touches... [An] unusual and moving true story that appeals to his offbeat sensibility, yet invites more emotional directness and clarity than anything he's done before.