Thursday, February 12, 2015

Movie Review : The Straight Story (1999)

Try asking someone at random , what life means to him? He would probably say, in short, a struggle. The struggle could be to make his ends meet. Or  to come to terms with its vicissitudes and imposing realities. Call someone else and pose the same question. He might reply , life is trust. Trust in someone or something. Trust that things will start working for him or trust that he will get better to brave problems. But I believe, that there is another word that shall subsume all the aforementioned propositions about life. Journey. Is there anything else  that a ‘journey’ cannot encompass in its broad meaning or anything that a journey cannot teach man?

David Lynch , as many might have known, is an American film-maker who is known for his surrealist movies. For the only time in his career , in 1999, he was hired by Walt Disney studios to merely ‘direct’ an already completed script based on a quirky old man , whose resoluteness transcended human understanding . It was about a man who was able to cross 310 miles of his country to reunite with his estranged old brother, with the help of a, lawn mower. The movie was ‘The Straight Story’ starring a 79 year old part-time actor Richard Farnsworth. The movie speaks not only about man’s doggedness in the face of adversity but also about another unmistakable fact. The intangible potential that a journey possesses to transform man even after age has rendered him impenetrable to learning and insensitive to experience.

David Lynch seems to have taken the time tested route taught by the Japanese film maker Yasujiro Ozu, who was the master when it came to handling lives of aged people in movies. The film is laden with Ozu’s pillow shots of magnificent landscapes embedding vast farmlands and thin roads that pierce through their interminable length and breadth.  Even the old man’s conversations that border on moralizing  ,those that recount both the happy and doleful experiences of youth and the diverse yet benevolent characters that help him accomplish his challenging journey,  all remind of Ozu’s memorable fables.

The old man has sinned , in his youth , against his brother and has been separated for a long time .The old man has only one aim , in his last few years of his life- to meet his invalid brother after ten long years and relive his childhood with him. The journey spans a horrendous five weeks in all to complete. There are occasions when people whom he meets, offer to take the burden of transporting him safely to his destination. The old man declines each time with different , totally untrue reasons. But the fact is ,that he feels that it is his burden, his ‘cross’ and his alone.  He probably assumes that the carrying of his burden shall relieve him of his any past sins or of any hauntingly distressful memories he may have had with his brother.  He deeply wishes that when he meets his brother , he must be a clean man, a man who is as guileless as a child, as he was probably once.  It is in a sense, a return to his childhood. A virtual time travel. The journey , he believes, is a catharsis.

The film , no doubt relies on the masterful act of Richard Farnsworth , whose sunken eyes and overgrown beard adds to the melancholy that shrouds the life of Alvyn Straight.
The film has plenty of metaphors which are easy to recognize.  Alvyn’s route in the long highway is always on the margin of the road that probably denotes the place , we have assigned to our seniors in our ever impatient society.  The mini-chamber and the baggage which Alvyn carries behind, denotes his past that continues to influence , undermine and dictate the progress towards his future. However the most striking of Lynch’s symbols is the accompaniment of the Divine, signified by the pillow shots which keep hovering  over  the old man throughout his solitary sojourn, overseeing him , shepherding  him with help and succor whenever needed and taking him to his destination  with safety, finally ,vanishing into the stars.

Lynch tempers the poignance of the mood with very fine sprinklings of ironical humor during the course of the journey. The old man witnesses a car in front of him colliding against a crossing stag ultimately killing it. The motorist gets out of the car and begins to bewail her ill-fated daily trips to work that had been killing plenty of similar stags over the last few weeks. The scene beautifully segues  into the old man appropriating the unclaimed stag for his dinner purpose, only to find that he is surrounded by many more stags staring at his ‘ruthless’ act with helpless indignation.  The pre-climactic sequence is also special where , the old man finds his motor going dead suddenly , leading him to brood over the unexpected predicament .  We begin to anticipate the old man , deciding to cover the rest of the distance by walk, but soon , he takes the advice of a passing tractor-man , to try restarting his engine. He tries once and the engine comes alive to our surprise. Absurdity!!

The Straight Story is one of David Lynch’s lesser known works. Lynch infuses so much poetry into the narrative as much as he impregnates with strong messages , all the more reason to consider the movie as a very important work in modern American cinema. 

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