This movie has the pace of the lawnmower that Alvin Straight uses to traverse the entire state of Iowa. It made me feel the physical weight of Time in a way very few films have. Its impossible for me to separate my experience of the movie from my engagement with Lynch's work. This was the last film of his that I hadn't seen, and famously it is his only G-rated movie, a Disney picture no less. The Straight Story's very existence jars, its title mocking you from within Lynch's oeuvre: the Normal One. I didn't know what to expect. From the credits forward Lynch's signature is on every single frame as it oozes America. Like his shirts, buttoned all the way to the top, and his naive, boyish exuberance, The Straight Story's trappings: the plainspoken dialogue full of Old Time Wisdom, the seeming tranquility of small town America, conceal some kind of unseen menace. Unnameable and unknowable. Its just like Blue Velvet or Twin Peaks for that matter, only the moment of eruption never comes. The camera never zooms into the grass to find the warring gnawing insects below the surface. Instead Lynch's obsessions: Death, Sex, Disability, Dysfunction, Trauma, are all buried inside the reality of the world created by the story. Instead of the juxtaposition of "peaceful" with "chaotic," like Twin Peaks, disrupted by the death of Laura Palmer, or Lumberton's suburbs contrasted with their "Lincoln St.," in The Straight Story all of these things are right on the screen, inextricably linked. In the opening moments, with a Lynchian mystery zoom into a shuttered window, we hear the main character fall. We're meant to think there's a good chance he's dead, everyone who discovers him seems to react that way, as if death is an ever present possibility. Which, when you are 73, it almost certainly is. Sex and dysfunction are there in the pregnant teen runaway Alvin meets on his journey, fleeing her family. Its there in Alvin's own biblical conflict with his brother at the heart of the film. Disability is there in Alvin's developmentally disabled daughter. Trauma is there in his daughter getting her kids taken away by the state, and in Alvin's memory from World War II of sniping one of his own friends and living with the secret for 60 years. Lynch has called it his most experimental film, and the way it creates the sense of time physically Existing is unlike anything I've seen. Alvin is old, this comes up again and again, and one of the ways that the film makes time so tangible is by focusing on this particular man's story. Every single movement, every word, every cigar, is taken with the utmost deliberation, full and heavy with significance. Like there may not be many of them left, and each one must be experienced. Each of the little meetings he has along the way, the lives he touches, the obstacles he overcomes, culminates in a powerfully simple ending that left me feeling spiritually satisfied. Life is a thing that happens To us. "What's the worst part about being old Alvin," a young man asks. "Remembering when you were young," Alvin says. Slow down a little sometimes, you'll get there.