The Straight Story

“Walt Disney Pictures Presents a Film by David Lynch”: from the opening titles, Lynch’s surprising follow-up to Lost Highway defies all audience expectations of “the Lynchian.” Longtime character actor and ex-stuntman Richard Farnsworth (Kirk Douglas’s double in Spartacus) earned an Oscar nod as an elderly man, too impaired to have a driver’s license, who instead drives his lawn mower across the Midwest to see his ailing brother. But a film can be “straight” and still be strange. “It may be my most experimental film,” Lynch noted. “Tenderness can be just as abstract as insanity.”