by Liam Lacey, Saturday, May 22, 1999

AT CANNES – The question on the final weekend of the Cannes Film Festival is: Why are these people acting like this? Why is Forest Whitaker pretending to be a samurai hitman in Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai? (The answer: Because Jarmusch likes hitman movies and samurai movies.) Why, in Manoel de Oliveira's The Letter, does a contemporary heroine, played by Chiara Mastroianni, suffer life-destroying guilt about leaving a loveless marriage? (The answer in this case is that the 90-year-old Portuguese director based the film on a 19th-century novel, The Princess of Cleves, and didn't bother updating it much.)

And finally, why did 73-year-old Alvin Straight want to drive for six weeks across country on a lawn tractor? And why did David Lynch want to make a movie about him? The answer to the last question is: To show he's really so straight it's weird. Lynch's last Cannes entry, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, in 1992, still stands as an example of why American studios are often nervous about exhibiting their films in the Cannes competition. Dismissed, or attacked as misanthropic, it was killed commercially at the festival before it ever had a chance to be seen by a North American public.

Feted at Cannes in 1990, when his film Wild At Heart won the Palme d'or, Lynch had the most rapid rise and fall in Cannes memory. Now he's back with The Straight Story. The two-hour flick is based on the real story of 73-year-old Alvin Straight who drove across Iowa on a lawn tractor to reconcile with his stroke-stricken brother in Wisconsin. Straight's reasons were that he didn't have a driver's licence and didn't like anyone else driving him. Lynch's reasons are more puzzling. No rotting ears in the grass (Blue Velvet), no dead nude teenagers (Twin Peaks), no hideously disfigured people (The Elephant Man). Just an old guy in need of hip-replacement surgery, too myopic to have a licence, and suffering from emphysema, driving for six weeks on the open highway.

Following the screening, critics were trying desperately to locate the irony in his new movie, but finally they surrendered. No, The Straight Story really is straight. A tender and lyrical little Home Box Office movie-of-the-week, with strong performances from lead Richard Farnsworth and Sissy Spacek as his mildly retarded daughter, and a nice story about family values.

At a press conference with his cast, Lynch, who has that so-straight-he's-weird look, still resembles a boy whose mother dresses him: hair clipped above the ears and a white shirt buttoned up to the top. When asked about his riches-to-rags Cannes history, he said with the practiced air of a politician: "Well, the Cannes festival is the best film festival in the world and the added suspense of being in competition lends a lot of excitement to it. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. Just as it happens in life."

The Straight Story, which Lynch describes as "America at 4½ miles an hour," was co-written by Mary Sweeney, his favourite editor, and John Roach, and shot by the legendary English cinematographer Freddie Francis (Moby Dick and The Elephant Man), who is 80.

Francis described his negotiations with Lynch: "But David, I'm 80. I can't work 16 hours a day.' So he said, 'How many can you work?' I said I could work 10, and we stuck to it. And came in two days ahead of schedule."

"It's true," confirmed Lynch. "Many people fell by the side of the road, but not Freddie. He's a very efficient director of photography."

Farnsworth, who starred in Phillip Borsos's The Grey Fox, worked as a stunt man for 30 years before becoming an actor and initially didn't want the part because he was scheduled for hip-replacement surgery. "I said to my agent: 'But I walk with a cane.' And he said, 'This guy walks with two canes.' So I said, 'Well, maybe I could manage that then.' "

Someone asked Lynch, somewhat desperately, if the movie represented his "personal pilgrimage."

"Well, I'm not on any pilgrimage," Lynch said. "I guess you'd have to say this is different from the things I've been doing lately. People react to things and I reacted to this script. It seemed like the right thing to do."

One of his biggest moments of delight, Lynch added, was when he got a call from a man at the ratings board. "He said, 'Mr. Lynch. Your movie is rated G.' I said, 'Could you please repeat that,' because I never expected to hear that in my life."