'The Straight Story,' There's a Gentleness About It

David Lynch, we know him for the rum "Mulholland Dr." and "Blue Velvet," maybe "The Elephant Man" and others for some viewers. You hear about "The Straight Story," G-rated and Disney. But its opening scene is not indicative of what we normally associate with Lynch or tame family films. Maybe at first the director is up to his weird play, when we hear a sound from inside a house, obviously a person hitting the floor, and Lynch pans away to focus on an unhealthy old woman stretched out on a cheap lawnchair. The scene suggests natural death that no one wants to think about.

An old man had fallen in the house. In the next scene, we see him on his back on the floor, and he's fine. Just needs help getting up. His daughter comes in and starts to freak out. It's funny because of the relief. You know the old bastard is fine.

The old man learns his brother had a stroke more than a couple of hundred miles away. The man's hips aren't hardly worth nothing. He can't drive to his brother in a car. But he tries with a riding lawnmower. It breaks down. He has to go back. He buys another lawnmower, a John Deere one. And you watch him leave his daughter behind again.

He meets a lot of people on the way and at one point notices a stream of younger people on bicycles and he pulls his lawnmower off the road and watches the alien crew zip in front of him and onward, they are passing him, an old man off the road. He watches their youth pass him.

There's a gentleness about it.