Quartile rating: 8/10 · 1 rating
Retired farmer and widower Alvin Straight learns one day that his distant brother Lyle has suffered a stroke and may not recover. Alvin is determined to make things right with Lyle while he still can, but his brother lives in Wisconsin, while Alvin is stuck in Iowa with no car and no driver's license. He then has the idea of making the trip on his old lawnmower, thus beginning a picturesque and at times deeply spiritual odyssey.
David Lynch's most uncharacteristically tender film is a quietly radical achievement — a road movie traversed at five miles per hour on a lawnmower, stripped of all Lynchian menace yet unmistakably his in its patient observation of American heartland life. Richard Farnsworth delivers one of cinema's great late-career performances, radiating weathered dignity and quiet grief in virtually every frame. Freddie Francis's cinematography bathes the Iowa and Wisconsin landscape in golden, elegiac light that feels genuinely transporting. The film's novelty lies in its paradox: Lynch, the king of the uncanny, making his most straightforwardly humanist work — yet the result is singular and irreducible, no one else could have made it feel quite this way. The plot is deliberately, even defiantly simple, which is both its strength and its limitation — some passages meander without adding much. The ending, though emotionally resonant in its restraint, deliberately withholds catharsis, which some will find profound and others underfulfilling.