The Straight Story
Laurens, Iowa, 1994. Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth) is a 73-year-old frail old man who falls in his kitchen one day and waits for help from his slow-witted daughter Rose (Sissy Spacek). She takes him to a doctor, from whom Alvin will heed no advice despite his many ailments. His solution for his painful walking problems is to use two canes.
One night during a raging thunderstorm, Alvin gets news informing him that his 75-year-old estranged brother Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton) has suffered a stroke. The next day on the phone with a relative, Rose says that Alvin and Lyle had a dispute ten years earlier and they have not spoken ever since.
Determined to see his brother after all that time, Alvin decides to visit him. The trouble is that Lyle lives 370 miles away in Mount Zion, Wisconsin, and Alvin is legally unable to drive a car due to his bad health and poor eyesight. To make matters worse, Rose cannot drive either and no buses go to Mount Zion. Undaunted, Alvin hatches a plan: he will drive his Rehd lawn mower all the way.
Alvin gathers some supplies, including a clapboard trailer that he hitches to the mower, and prepares for his long journey. Rose is worried about him, but the night before he departs, he tells her to look up into the sky at the stars.
Some of Alvin's old friends warn him on the way out of town that his journey is foolhardy, but he continues on, moving a few miles an hour for only a few hours until his tractor breaks down outside town. He and his tractor get towed back home, where he promptly puts the Rehd rider out of its misery with a shotgun blast. Reunited with his daughter, Alvin's determination knows no bounds, so he buys a new vehicle: a 1966 John Deere riding lawn mower with a top speed of five miles per hour.
On September 5, Alvin sets off once more for Wisconsin. By day he travels on the road and at night he camps out in the fields off the road, making a campfire for himself every night.
The first person he meets along his route is a pregnant, runaway hitchhiker (Anastasia Webb), to whom he offers some hot dogs and some inspiration after she explains that her parents would hate her for her condition. Alvin explains that his wife bore 14 children, only 7 of whom lived, and that Rose herself had 4 kids but they were taken away after a fire she was wrongly blamed for. He tells the girl that he used to ask his kids to each find a stick and try to break it, which they could do easily; then he would ask them to each place a stick in a bundle and try to break it, which they could not do. That bundle, he says, is family. The next morning, the girl is gone, having left behind a bundle of sticks.
Some time later, Alvin encounters a bicycle race rolling through a town. The bicyclists are happy to welcome him to their camp after he arrives, and he spends time regaling the young men with what he has learned as an old man.
On another day, Alvin encounters a frantic woman (Barbara E. Robertson) who has hit a deer in the road just in front of him. She tells him that she appears to have an unwanted ability to make deer jump in front of her moving car. That night, Alvin eats venison for dinner over a fire while an odd group of deer decoys looks on.
Five weeks into his trip, as the landscape begins to undulate, Alvin's trusty mower goes out of control and he speeds down a steep hill where a few people are gathered to watch the controlled burning of an abandoned house. A kindly middle-aged couple called the Riordans (James Cada, Sally Wingert) welcome him to stay with them as he has his tractor fixed. Alvin calls Rose to have him send his Social Security check because he is almost out of money.
A local man about Alvin's age invites him to a bar (Alvin does not drink, so he has milk). Alvin recalls his days in WWII, when he returned from France as a heavy drinker until a preacher helped him. He explains that he drank so much because he kept seeing terrible things from war. The other man recalls how one night all of his buddies were blown up by Nazis in a tent while he was standing outside. Alvin recalls shooting one of his own men by accident, and letting the rest of his men believe he was killed by a German sniper, a secret he has not confessed since it happened.
A pair of bickering twins fix Alvin's mower and he haggles over the price. Then Alvin tells them about the closeness of brothers, and how he said terrible things to his brother when they last met. Now he hopes he's not too late.
Alvin sets off again, crossing the MIssissippi River. Staying in a church cemetery for one night near Mount Zion, Alvin confesses his problems to a local priest (John Lordan), telling him that anger and vanity mixed with liquor is what caused him and Lyle to stop speaking. Now, he just wants to make peace and look up at the stars with Lyle.
After stopping in a bar in Mount Zion and drinking his first beer in years, Alvin makes the final stage of his journey down a dirt road to his brother's shack. Alvin approaches the door and calls out Lyle's name. Lyle makes his way to the front porch, warily, using a walker.
The two brothers reunite. They share a powerful moment with few words.
