When I first watched “The Straight Story,” I concentrated on the foreground and liked it. During my second viewing, I also paid attention to the background, and that’s when I fell in love with it. The film is primarily concerned with Alvin Straight’s journey through the neglected small towns and rural areas in the Midwest, not to mention the myriad of caring souls who are willing to listen to his story. One may think such kindness of strangers is too good to be true—if not for the fact that the film is based on a true story.

Straight (Richard Farnsworth) is a 73-year-old man who lives in Laurens, Iowa. One day, he finds out that his brother is gravely ill and wishes to see him before he dies. Unfortunately, he is unable to drive due to his poor eyesight. The old man lives with his daughter Rose (Sissi Spacek) who shows signs of mental retardation, and she is an awful driver. Obviously, they do not own a car. But they do happen to have a lawn mower, and the moment Alvin spots it, he knows that this is the solution to his 300-mile trip to Mt. Zion, Wisconsin. Although one mower breaks down mid-trip, he is able to acquire a second one, John Deere. After attaching a trailer, he sets off down the road.

I expect we’ll discover a lot about Alvin, including a traumatic secret that has haunted him since the war. He is not a sophisticated man but speaks in world-building fashion, walls of words held together with unyielding steel. Just like in Hemingway’s dialogues, John Roach and Mary Sweeney’s screenplay captures poetry and truth in the carefully picked choice of mundane phrases. Richard Farnsworth, who was 79 when he filmed this, delivers the lines with utter calmness and confidence. 

With David Lynch at the helm—an unconventional filmmaker in his own right, known for “Wild at Heart” and “Twin Peaks”—I half-expected Alvin’s driving adventure to cross over into the Twilight Zone. But it never does. Even with potential weirdos, like the distraught woman who drives over 14 deer in a week on the same stretch of highway, (“. . . and I HAVE to take this road!”), she’s not a sideshow exhibit and we think, yeah, you could hit a lot of deer on those country roads.

For Alvin, the journey to see his brother is a nostalgic one. He recalls the starry nights with his brother saying, “I want to sit with him and look up at the stars, like we used to, so long ago.” Their courtship, his marriage, and then his Army service as a sniper rings a bell. His exceptional marksmanship came with a price and resulted in years wasted due to alcohol. One thing is certain, annoyingly sane people seem to feel that he’s finally coming out of the forge of imperfections, a better man in the eyes of a more simplistic, sober world. 

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My all time favorite stop of his is where he almost dies when a belt shear sends him into acceleration so rapid, he loses control down a hill only to burn out where a gathering on lawn chairs are mesmerized by local firefighters practicing live drills. 

The onboard cast includes the feuding twin brothers who endlessly argue while simultaneously billing Alvin by the hour for mower repairs, as well as retired John Deere employee Danny Riordan (James Cada) who permits Alvin, a self-imposed recluse, to camp out in his shed-turned-granary.

Danny is a remarkable man whose sweetness and tact are instinctive, who understands what the situation calls for and gives it without show. He reflects all of our collective sentiments towards this “lovable” old fool. He offers gentle counseling but Alvin is obstinate, “You’re a kind man speaking to a stubborn man.” If Riordan and the deer lady and the dueling twins and a forlorn young girl are the background I was talking about, so are the actual places. The cinematographer, Freddie Francis, who once made the vastness of Utah a backdrop for Executioner’s Song, knows how to evoke a landscape without making it too nurturing. Here there are also fields of waving corn and grain, and rivers and woods and little bed barns, but instead of the wind whispering in the trees playing a sad and lonely song on the soundtrack, we are reminded not of the fields we drive through on our way to picnics but on our way to funerals, autumn days when the roads are empty and the refined striations of gently undulating hills cut across the sky.

The faces in this movie are among its treasures. Farnsworth himself has a face like an old wrinkled billfold that he has paid good money for and expects to see him out. There is another old man who sits next to him on a barstool near the end of the movie whose face is witness to time. And look and listen to the actor who plays the bartender in that very late scene, the one who serves Alvin the Miller Lite. I can’t find his name in the credits but he finds the right note. He knows how all good bartenders can seem like a friend bringing a present to a sickroom.

The last notes are also just right. Who will this dying brother be and what will he say? Will the screenplay say too much or reach for easy sentimentalism? Not at all. Just because you have to see someone doesn’t mean you have a lot to gab about. No matter how far you have come.