Newsletter: A parable of grace
I'm on break -- this is the week I'll use to strategize, plan, and finally begin the revision process -- but today, I'm sharing a film review of David Lynch's "The Straight Story"
Dear Reader:
We are entering Passion Week — leading up to Easter Sunday. This morning, rather than attending church, I stayed home to nurse my back — which went out yesterday after I spent ten hours editing my wife’s latest audiobook project.
Rather than listening to a preacher, I spent the morning watching a different type of sermon.
A film.
As I read the New York Time’s recommendations from Disney+ yesterday, I realized that David Lynch had produced a G-rated film, The Straight Story (1999). It’s about Alvin Straight, a 73-year-old WWII veteran who travels 370 miles from Iowa to Wisconsin to reconcile with his brother Lyle. I know Lynch’s work, which tends to focus on the strange and the dark. Curious, I decided to watch the film.
The film tells a powerful story with truth and restraint.
Played by Richard Farnsworth (1920-2006), Alvin takes a journey of penitence, driving his John Deere tractor from Iowa to Wisconsin. He has little money, he doesn’t want anyone else “driving his bus,” and he can’t drive a car because of his bad eyesight. He pulls a trailer behind him, camping in Iowa cornfields and sleeping in that trailer. Somewhere around midpoint, we discover from this man of few words that Alvin and Lyle had an argument ten years previous, and said “unforgivable things” to each other.
The power of the story lies in its accuracy — Alvin Straight lived from 1920 - 1996, and he died three years after he finished that trip. Across the trip, this reticent man, who is a mystery at the beginning of the story, slowly but surely reveals the transformation that a lifetime of reflection and difficult times has effected.
Alvin is a stubborn man, and Farnsworth plays him with restraint. Along the way, Alvin dispenses and accepts grace while interacting with strangers: a runaway girl who is five-months-pregnant, twin brothers who can’t stop bickering even when they are fixing his tractor, a priest who offers him a meal of mashed potatoes and meatloaf as he camps in the grass just beside a graveyard, a fellow veteran who helps him confess his darkest wartime moment over a lite beer, and a group of strangers who help him out when the John Deere’s engine belt and transmission go bad, almost killing Alvin.
With each encounter, we learn more about this man whose beautiful face we learn to know and try to read as he travels. Driven by his love for a brother with whom he was very close as a boy, he eventually finds his way to his destination.
The ending to this parable of grade is as terse as the main character.
After stopping for a beer at a bar not far from his brother’s home, Alvin gets back on the road. At one point, his engine stops and it takes a passing farmer to encourage him to start it again. But eventually, Alvin pulls up to the ramshackle house where his brother Lyle — now suffering from a stroke — is living.
Alvin canes his way up to the house, and calls out his brother’s name. Lyle responds with energy, and makes his way out the front door on to the porch. Alvin clumps up the steps, and the two men face each other across the Lyle’s walker.
“Sit down, Alvin,” Lyle finally tells him.
The brothers sit, and there is silence. They stare at each other for a long beat. Then Lyle turns and looks out at Alvin’s rig for a long time.
“Did you ride that thing all the way out here to see me?” Lyle asks.
“I did, Lyle.”
Lyle nods, and the camera returns to Straight’s face. Then Lyle’s. Then Straight’s. There might be a tear on Alvin’s face. Perhaps on Lyle’s, but you can’t quite tell. Then someone’s breath catches, and the camera tracks up to black and into a starry night sky. Credits roll to the sound of a stringed instrument playing over an orchestra.
I was left to think about the choices I have made in my own life.
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