SOURCE: Tayler, Chris. “Life in the Slow Lane.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5046 (17 December 1999): 17.

In the following review, Tayler praises Lynch's restrained cinematic style in The Straight Story.

David Lynch's new film, The Straight Story, is about a stubborn, laconic old widower who chooses to drive 300 miles on a lawnmower to visit his estranged and ailing brother. Sometimes charming and sometimes sentimental, it is an uncharacteristically restrained piece of filmmaking: quiet, autumnal and, above all, slow. Not that it is unclear whose work we are watching; during The Straight Story, we are shown such Lynch-film staples as wood being sawn, machinery hulking and humming, an obese woman, and a house on fire. The director has famously made a career out of unsettling his audiences' expectations, and these references emphasize and make strange the determinedly “straight” mode of storytelling, as well as indicating that, as Walter Benjamin believed of Kafka...