Straight, played by the late Richard Farnsworth, is a 73-year-old man from Laurens, Iowa, who finds out that his brother is dying and wants to see him one last time. His vision prevents him to drive. He lives with his daughter Rose, played by Sissy Spacek, who is somewhat a special needs case and can’t drive herself. They don’t even own a car. However, they have a lawn mower tractor, and the moment Alvin looks at it, he knows how he can drive the 300 miles to Mt. Zion. Wisconsin. The first mower dies on him, but he gets another one, a John Deere, hooks a little trailer on it, and stubbornly drives off on the road.
Ebert noted, “Along the way we will learn a lot about Alvin, including a painful secret he has kept ever since the war. He is not a sophisticated man, but when he speaks, the words come out like the bricks of a wall built to last. Like Hemingway's dialogue, the screenplay by John Roach and Mary Sweeney finds poetry and truth in the exact choice of the right everyday words.” Richard Farnsworth, who was 79 when he made the film, says the lines with perfect peace and faith.
Ebert noted, “Because the film was directed by David Lynch, who usually deals in the bizarre ("Wild at Heart," "Twin Peaks"), we keep waiting for the other shoe to drop--for Alvin's odyssey to intersect with the Twilight Zone. But it never does. Even when he encounters a potential weirdo, like the distraught woman whose car has killed 14 deer in one week on the same stretch of highway (". . . and I HAVE to take this road!"), she's not a sideshow exhibit and we think, yeah, you can hit a lot of deer on those country roads.”
Alvin’s drive to his brother, played by Harry Dean Stanton, is a look into his past. He remembers when they were young and thought a lot. He tells a stranger, “I want to sit with him and look up at the stars, like we used to, so long ago.” He remembers his engagement and marriage. His Amry service as a sniper whose aim, one day, was too good. He also admits to years lost because of drinking and ridicule. Ebert said, “He has emerged from the forge of his imperfections as a better man, purified, simple, and people along the way seem to sense that.”
Ebert admitted, “My favorite, of all of his stops, comes in a town where he's almost killed when he loses a drive belt and speeds out of control down a hill.” He comes to stop where some people in lawn chairs are watching the local firefighters practicing putting out a fire.
In the town are twin brothers who fight all the time, even when charging him by the hour to repair the John Deere. A retired John Deere employee named Danny Riordan, played by James Dada, who lets Alvin stay in his backyard for a while (Alivn won’t enter the house, even to use the phone).
Danny is a rare man of innate sweetness and politeness, who sees what the situation needs and gives it without display. He embodies every one of our feelings about this likable old fool. He nicely offers advice, but Alvin is firm: “You’re a kind man talking to a stubborn man.” Ebert said, “If Riordan and the deer lady and the dueling twins (and a forlorn young girl) are the background I was talking about, so are the locations themselves. The cinematographer, Freddie Francis, who once made the vastness of Utah a backdrop for "The Executioner's Song," knows how to evoke a landscape without making it too comforting.” There are fields of flying corn and grain here, and rivers of woods and little bed barns, but on the soundtrack the wind whispering in the trees play a sad and soothing song, and we are reminded not of the field we drive past on our way to the park, but on our way to funerals, on autumn days when the roads are empty.
The faces in this movie are among its gifts. Farnsworth himself has a face like an old, wrinkled grump that he paid good money for and expects to see him out. There is another old man who sits next to him on a barstool near the end of the movie, whose face is like the witness to time. Note: look and listen to the actor who plays the bartender in that same late scene, the one who serves Alivn the Miller Lite. Ebert admitted, “I can't find his name in the credits, but he finds the right note: He knows how all good bartenders can seem like a friend bringing a present to a sickroom.”
The last notes are also just right. Who will this dying brother be, and what will he say? Will the screenplay say too much or reach for easy sentimentality? Not at all. Just because you must see someone doesn’t mean you have a lot to talk about. No matter how far you’ve come.
This movie came out in 1999, and it was quite a surprise. You might think this entire movie is going to be about Alvin on that John Deere driving to see his brother, and that’s it. When you first watch it, you think that it will be boring, but the people Alvin meets, the interactions he has with every one of them, and the ending really save this movie. You get a good feeling about it when it ends, and everything comes together to make this worth it. Check it out and see for yourself.
Tomorrow I will look at a pilot for a series that I didn’t watch growing up, but I knew about since I saw commercials for it in “Disney Month 2022.”
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