The Straight Story

We watched the DVD "The Straight Story."

Synopsis

Laurens, Iowa, 1994. Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth) is a 73-year-old frail old man who walks using sticks, and lives with his slow-witted daughter Rose (Sissy Spacek). One night, during a raging thunderstorm, Alvin gets a phone call from a hospital informing him that his 75-year-old estranged brother Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton) has suffered a stroke. Determined to meet and patch things up with his brother before either one of the dies, Alvin decides to visit him. The trouble is that Lyle lives over 300 miles away in Mount Zion, Wisconsin, and Alvin is legally unable to drive a car due to his bad health and poor eyesight. To make matters worse, Rose cannot drive either and they have no money for a bus fair. Undaunted, Alvin hatches a plan: he will drive his Rhoda lawn mower all the way. Sadly the Rhoda is not up to the task and splutters to a halt 10 miles away outside the town of Grotto. Reunited with his daughter, Alvins stubbornness knows no bounds, so he approaches Tom the Dealer (Everett McGill) to fix him up with a new vehicle: a 1966 John Deere riding lawn mower with a top speed of five miles per hour from Tom's personal collection. On September 15, Alvin sets off once more to Wisconsin. By day he travels on the road and at nights he camps out in the fields off the road making a campfire for himself every night. Alvins epic journey sees him meeting a pregnant, runaway hitchhiker (Anastasia Webb) whom he inspires to return to her family after a nightly campfire cookout. A few days later, Alvin encounters and comes in last in a bicycle race a local town is having. Then, Alvin encounters a frantic woman (Barbara E. Robertson) who has hit a deer and she tells him that she appears to have an unwanted ability to make deer come out and act like lemmings in front of her moving car. On October 8, as the landscape begins to undulate, Alvin's trusty mower goes out of control and he speeds down a steep hill and it turns out to have fan-belt and transmission failure. So, five weeks after leaving home, Alvin is forced to wait again for it to be repaired and staying with a kindly couple called the Riordans (James Cada, Sally Wingert). Haggling with the Olsen twins Thorvald and Harold (John and Kevin P. Farley) so that he can afford the bill, Alvin sets off again. Staying in a church cemetery for one night Alvin confides his life and problems to a local priest (John Lordan) and his determination to complete the trip. Alvin then crosses the Mississippi River into Wisconsin, slowly approaching his brother's home. After stopping in a bar in Mount Zion and drinking his first beer in years, Alvin makes the final stage of his journey down a dirt road to his brother's shack where he is finally reunited with Lyle at last.