Straight Story, The

The new David Lynch film is a sort of tone poem to the neglected and the lost, both on screen and in life. Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth), an old man whose body is preparing to give up the ghost, rigs a rickety trailer to a riding lawnmower and sets out, at 5 mph, across some 300 Midwest miles, intent on repairing relations with the estranged, stroke-wracked brother he has not spoken to in more than 10 years. Not much “happens”—the film is more European than American in feel—but this is very much a Lynch film, as the director continues to mine his obsession with the weird in the mundane.