The Straight Story (1999) on Netflix
Alvin Straight, seventy-three, learns his estranged brother Lyle has had a stroke in Wisconsin. With no driver's license, he sets off from his Iowa home on a riding lawn mower.
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- IMDb8.0/10109,842 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes95%
Trailer
Plot summary
Alvin Straight lives in Laurens, Iowa, with his daughter Rose, on his Social Security check. He walks with two canes and keeps most of his failing health to himself. When he learns that his brother Lyle, in Mount Zion, Wisconsin, has suffered a stroke, Alvin decides to make peace with him after ten years of estrangement. He has no driver's license and cannot see well enough to drive, so he hitches a trailer to a riding lawn mower for the 240-mile trip. His family, friends and neighbors are surprised by the plan. The mower breaks down, and Alvin accepts a ride on a passing tour bus while he arranges a replacement tractor.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Straight Story (1999)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Producers cast their first choice, Richard Farnsworth, as Alvin Straight; though he was reluctant to commit because he was then terminally ill with metastatic prostate cancer, he took the role out of admiration for Straight.
- In contrast to David Lynch's usual work featuring surrealist imagery and adult themes, The Straight Story was produced and marketed as a family-friendly mainstream feature and was the only Lynch film to receive a G rating from the MPAA.
- The film came from a newspaper story: in 1994, 73-year-old Alvin Straight rode a lawnmower across roughly 250 miles of the American Midwest to visit his ailing brother, and Mary Sweeney, David Lynch's frequent collaborator, read about it in The New York Times that summer.
- Richard Farnsworth earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for his portrayal of Alvin Straight, and for 21 years he held the record as the oldest person, at 79, to be nominated for a Best Actor Oscar.
- There are no chapter markers on the original North American DVD release: a note written by Lynch inside the case reads, "It is my opinion that a film is not a book - it should not be broken up. It is a continuum and should be seen as such."
- Producer Ray Stark had already acquired the rights to Straight's story and envisioned it as a potential star vehicle for Paul Newman; the rights became available again after Straight died in 1996, and Sweeney co-wrote the script with childhood friend John Roach, the two retracing Straight's route as they wrote.
- Peter Schneider, Disney's president of production at the time, got the idea to have the studio acquire the film after seeing it at Cannes, calling it "a beautiful movie about values, forgiveness and healing" and saying that as soon as he saw it, he knew it was a Walt Disney film.
