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Movie Review
"Fight Club"
The late-'90s crisis of masculinity has arrived in pop culture with a vengeance.
By Andrew O'Hehir
[10/15/99]

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"Julien Donkey-Boy"
Critical vertigo, a homely Chloë Sevigny and one jabbering schizophrenic -- this all means something to director Harmony Korine.
By Ana Marie Cox
[10/15/99]

Movie Review
"The Story of Us"
This Bruce Willis-Michelle Pfeiffer breakup story doesn't have one.
By Stephanie Zacharek
[10/15/99]

Music Review
Sharps & flats
After hemorrhaging mystique for a decade, David Bowie finally releases a record that's better than its gimmicks.
By Gavin McNett
[10/15/99]

Music Review
Sharps & flats
Archer Prewitt's songs sound like they were written on a piece of shag carpet resting in a slice of sun.
By Carlene Bauer
[10/14/99]

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There have been other American filmmakers, Preston Sturges and Jonathan Demme among them, who've recognized the quirks and eccentricities of normal folk. But in "Blue Velvet" and in the best episodes of "Twin Peaks," in the muddled and criminally neglected "Fire Walk With Me" and now in "The Straight Story," no director has been so buzzingly alert to the emotional lives of those people or to the beauty of the world they inhabit as David Lynch. In the phony, condescending "American Beauty," Sam Mendes pretends to look beneath the surface of suburbia and comes up with only clichés about suburbia's stifling conformity, all of it offered up with unconcealed contempt for his characters and setting. David Lynch starts with clichés -- a picture-postcard view of a small American downtown, conversations conducted in "Gee whiz!" or "Well, whaddya know about that!" exclamations -- and comes up with the unarticulated longings, joys and sorrows those clichés struggle to contain.

The Straight Story Directed by David Lynch Starring Richard Farnsworth and Sissy Spacek

The talk in a David Lynch movie is often banal; what's being expressed in that talk is often emotionally profound. It's a little like listening to the astronauts in the films NASA took of the moon missions and hearing as they try in their regular-guy way to find a way to express the inexpressible. David Lynch makes movies about the moments when the familiar becomes as thrilling and strange as orbiting the Earth. It's no accident that in the first image of "The Straight Story," we're staring at a nighttime sky impossibly heavy with twinkling stars, while listening to the reassuring chirp of crickets. The image sums up the dual pull of Lynch's work: the simultaneous desire for the comfort of the familiar and the compulsion to find out what else is out there.

"The Straight Story" has its origins in a newspaper item that appeared a few years back. Upon hearing that the brother he hadn't spoken to in 10 years had suffered a stroke, 73-year-old Alvin Straight set off to visit him, traveling more than 300 miles from Iowa to Wisconsin aboard his John Deere lawn mower. It's easy to imagine how that story was probably presented, as the sort of thing that's called a "human interest story" but reduced to an oddity to fill up a newspaper page or round out the 11 o'clock news. Lynch, with his deep love of the odd, must have heard Alvin Straight's story and thought, "Why not?" Alvin, immaculately and beautifully played by Richard Farnsworth, had cataracts that prevented him from driving a car, and he needed two canes to get around. Lynch's movie (dedicated to Alvin, who died in 1996) understands its hero's journey as a proud man's quiet way of retaining the independence he has left.

If "The Straight Story" is the gentlest, most straightforward film Lynch has ever made (that's the dual meaning of the title) it is no less recognizably a David Lynch movie. The advance word on "The Straight Story" has made much of the irony of a G-rated David Lynch movie being released by Disney. The Arts & Leisure section of the Sunday New York Times, always on the lookout for one of those idiot trend pieces editors are so enamored of, decided that the film represents the trend of "major directors with reputations for outré subjects ... making fare to which they can, at last, take their children." The writer, Brendan Lemon, characterized Lynch's work as being about "sadistic, drug-enhanced sex and small-town violence." What a pitifully narrow view of David Lynch's work. At the risk of sounding like a New Age greeting card, I'd say Lynch's movies have always been about the light as much as the darkness. The sex and violence in "Blue Velvet" or "Fire Walk with Me" exist not to refute the welcoming suburban sights, the white picket fences and firemen waving from their trucks and the coffee shops of your dreams, but on equal footing with them. Like Elvis Presley in "Love Me Tender" refusing to choose between the aching plaintiveness of true love and the growling earthly pleasures of sex, Lynch sees a continuum instead of a contradiction. Lynch's characters don't want to escape the idyll of small-town life, but rather to cling to it even as they descend further and further into their own personal infernos.

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