(1999) In early September, nearly blind and lame, using two canes (but obstinately having refused a walker), Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth) at 73 leaves Lauren, Iowa, on a red Rehd riding lawn mower hitched to a trailer (large enough for some supplies, 15 gallons of gasoline, and bunking down) to see his younger brother Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton), who's suffered a stroke in Mount Zion, Wisconsin.

Alvin's daughter Rose (Sissy Spacek), with whom he resides - though she's regarded as mentally "slow" (after a fire, the state, determining her to be an incompetent mother, took away her four children), she has a firm grasp of facts and figures - informs her father that the journey would be 370 miles. His doctor has warned him that unless he makes significant lifestyle changes (such as giving up smoking cigars), he's apt to experience more serious consequences than falling down because of his bad hips.

In a Disney production (originally rated G for general audiences, though the film today might receive an R for having scenes with tobacco smoking), director David Lynch, in for him an unusually "straight" narrative, portrays an arduous trip of an obstreperous codger ("hard swallow of my pride"), in memory of the actual Alvin Straight (1920-1996), from John Roach and Mary Sweeney's script, as Angelo Badalamenti's soundscape smoothly complements the rural landscape.

When Alvin's lawn mower breaks down a short ways out of town, he returns by bus, retrieves the mower and trailer with the help of a pickup truck, shoots the offensive machine with two blasts from a shotgun in his backyard, and purchases a pre-owned, green, '66 John Deere mower for his second attempt.

Along the way he encounters Crystal (Anastasia Webb), a pregnant runaway teenager, who tells him as they're roasting wieners over a campfire that her family hates her; he tells her that a family is like a bundle of sticks, stronger than a single twig. After being passed by semis and a large group of bicyclists, Alvin spends the night in a campground with the young cyclists, answering a young man's inquiry by saying: "Worst part of being old is rememberin' when you was young."

A hysterical woman, after hitting a deer with her car, screams at Alvin (in an authentic Lynch scene) that she has struck thirteen deer over the past seven weeks: "And I love deer!" Following her driving off, Alvin has venison for dinner and keeps the antlers as a display on the trailer.

Coming down the steep grade of a hill into Claremont, Alvin nearly loses control without brakes on the trailer; he's befriended by strangers, especially Danny Riordan (James Cada), haggles with twin-brother mechanics over the price for fixing his machine - reminding the bickering siblings that "A brother's a brother" - and shares tragic, unforgettable war stories with another veteran. Five weeks into his journey, turning down Danny's generous offer to drive him the remaining 60 miles ("I wanna finish this one my own way"), he continues on in his John Deere with a new drive belt and repaired transmission, sans blade.

After crossing a bridge over the Mississippi River into Wisconsin, he camps beside a cemetery with a chapel from which emerges a Catholic priest to whom Alvin confesses, after a long feud with his brother (like Cain and Abel with liquor): "I wanna make peace."

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