It will, no doubt, be often and wryly commented that the most "Lynchian" moment of The Straight Story occurs during the opening credits: when that Disney Cinderella castle logo unfurls and twinkles, and then is followed by the words "Walt Disney Pictures presents" (pause) ..."A Film By David Lynch". This wacky juxtaposition cracked up a roomful of veteran film reviewers at the preview screening I attended, and seemed worthy indeed of that maestro of bizzaro combinations, director David Lynch.

The other comment bound to be made in connection with this particular film (might as well get the obvious out of the way) is that Lynch, for once, plays it "straight". Those unfamiliar with the rest of David Lynch's notorious oeuvre should know that most of his previous films could be filed rather comfortably under the category of "Twisted". The stock-in-trade of the director of movies like Eraserhead (1977), Blue Velvet (1986) and The Elephant Man (1980) has been deformity, violence, kinky sex, and some of the most "un-straight" characters ever made to writhe and sputter on the silver screen. With the exception of The Elephant Man and the made-for-television Twin Peaks, I'd be hard-pressed to recommend Lynch to most folk: for like the wide-eyed innocent character in Blue Velvet with whom the viewer is made to identify, one risks being corrupted by Lynch's investigation of the seamy underbelly of the human experience.

That said, let me now say that The Straight Story is a genuinely sweet, genuinely moving, genuinely G-rated film. It as if George Romero (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead ad nauseum) suddenly presented moviegoers with Driving Miss Daisy. No kidding. I'm shooting you— er, you know, straight. In other words, let me take this very weird opportunity to urge you to gather your whole family— kids, grandparents and all —this week to go see David Lynch's touching new feelgood film.

Of course, Lynch will deny that The Straight Story represents any major departure for him. To be sure, he's always had his sweet, gee whiz side. This is the director dubbed "Jimmy Stewart From Mars" by a producer who encountered Lynch's schizoid outlook on life: genuinely wholesome, just as genuinely creepy. Typically, Lynch has played both sides of the street by setting up some cultural ideal and knocking it down: evoking Americana (especially the 50s) and exposing corruption below the surface.

In The Straight Story, however, Lynch probes beneath the surface of middle-Americana and reveals not layers of hypocrisy and the falsity of cultural ideals, but a solid bedrock of moral reality. The Montana-born Lynch has always envinced a true genius for spotting and depicting the ordinary. In Twin Peaks, it was the idiosyncrasies of a town and townspeople in the Pacific Northwest. Here, Lynch takes honest delight in Midwestern peculiarities — everydayness as basic as the logistics of making a long-distance phone call or haggling over a repair bill.

Joel and Ethan Coen have an ear for the oddities of Main Street, too, and while perhaps their art is free of the outright scorn of a Sinclair Lewis, the Coen Brothers are coy enough that you can't ever be sure whether you're laughing with or at their oddball characters. The schizoid Lynch clearly loves Main Street, even as he knows both its "Sunny" and "Shady" sides (to use Chesterton's terms from his twin essays, "The Case Against Main Street" and "The Case For Main Street" — which, by the way forms a convincing vindication of Lynch's schizoid view.)

The plot of The Straight Story is based on a true story, a bit of tabloid quirkiness of the kind David Lynch (like Flannery O'Connor) has always found irresistible. In 1994, Alvin Straight, aged 73 and barely able to walk, drove 260 miles on his '66 John Deere tractor mower to make peace with his estranged brother, Lyle, who'd just had a stroke. The detail (aside from Alvin's last name) that probably really sold Lynch on this story was the name of the town in which Lyle lived: Mt. Zion. Thus Alvin Straight's journey becomes a pilgrimage. Pulling a trailer twice as big as his mower, Alvin puts along at 5 mph (you'd hate to get stuck behind unable to pass this geezer), meeting people and having adventures. There's a great shot of Alvin on the road, where the camera pans to the sky, holds for a long while, then pans back down to find the poor guy's barely moved from his last location.

At such a pace, there's plenty of opportunity for Alvin to share his folksy wisdom with fellow pilgrims that include a runaway pregnant teenager and a World War II vet. (The catharsis many aging vets found in the film Saving Private Ryan is here delivered in a single, gripping scene.) In his travels, Alvin also reveals much about the pilgrimage that has been his life. We come to feel touched and changed by our own encounter with Alvin Straight's uncommon, if ordinary, goodness and solid sense.

My suspicion is that this film was written for or at least originally conceived of by Lynch with his quintessential stock player, Jack Nance, in mind. The quirky Nance starred in Lynch's first significant film, the 1977 underground classic Eraserhead, and made an appearance in nearly everything the director has done ever since. Nance, who died in 1996, would have made this a different film: probably a little more over the top, a little less "straight".

Richard Farnsworth, on the other hand, struck me the first time I saw him in The Grey Fox (1982) as one of the most convincingly "real" actors I'd ever seen: they don't make 'em any more straight. Actually 78 years old when this film was shot, Farnsworth comes across as aged but sharp: the authentic human tragedy of having all one's marbles intact only to better observe one's body falling irrevocably apart. Indeed, besides his marbles, all Alvin seems to have left at the end of his life is his determination: he turns down offers of rides, driven by his need to finish his business his own way. More than once, Lynch cuts from shots of Alvin on the road driving his peewee tractor to a huge combine in a field harvesting grain. "It's harvest time," says Alvin's daughter Rose, and we understand that for Alvin, this phrase has a much deeper significance than simply picking corn. For Alvin, there is a sense that his whole life has led to this cockamamie journey on a mower, that the quality of the crop that his life has been somehow depends on the success of his lonely pilgrimage to Mt. Zion.

Sissy Spacek brings equal determination to her portrayal of Alvin's grown daughter Rose, a misfit who might seem on the surface stereotypical white trash — raggedy, stuttering, and slow. But as we get to know Rose, we find her both industrious and creative (she builds birdhouses), and an apt caregiver and companion for her weakening father, while quietly grieving for the children the State of Iowa deemed her incompetent to keep.

This particular Walt Disney Picture may be the one David Lynch film which even little kids might be responsibly permitted to watch, but that doesn't necessarily make it a "kids movie". I say this not because of the subject matter (there's no sexual situations, no bad language except for a few jocular "What the Hells"), but because the film goes, maybe not as slow as Alvin, but a tad slower than most films opening with that Cinderella castle logo. And there are occasional quirky "Lynchian" moments that I find kids, not being as attuned to irony as jaded adults, just don't get. But again, the quirkiness is very subtle for a Lynch film.

Here's the kind of restraint we're talking about: the film uses as a sort of leitmotif a wide shot of the action, with the audio perspective matching the camera angle. In other words, we pull back both in picture and sound, barely able to hear exchanges between characters that seem all the more intimate and real. (This bit works so well that I expected to come back to it in the climactic scene when Straight arrives at his destination, which it didn't, making me think it was a postproduction addition.)

The film was shot by Freddie Francis, Lynch's DP from Elephant Man and Dune. The lighting is naturalistic, with cluttery art direction, though not surely because of budget considerations, but from Lynch's desire to play everything "straight". Of course, "straight" is not necessarily prosaic: the film features lots of lovely aerial swoops over farmland, accompanied by a swooping fiddle that floats above a descending bass lines reminiscent of the Twin Peaks theme — maybe an intentional reminder that this remains a movie by David Lynch. Indeed, when the aerial POV first dropped down from the sky into a town, then a yard, I almost wondered if we were going to keep going down, as in Blue Velvet, until we faced below the surface of the yard the violent battling of Nature under all.

But the probing beneath the surface here is not an expose of ideals to show their absurd falsity, but instead to show their ordinary truth. The opening notes of the Straight Story score (by Angelo Badalamenti, another longtime Lynch collaborator) feature a subtle quote of the folk song, "Be It Ever So Humble, There's No Place Like Home" — and all those "how-to" screenplay books which insist a movie's theme should be reducible to a single sentence would surely fix on this sentence as Lynch's theme. Because of this, I've already begun to hear complaints from Lynch fans who expect only battling insects and dancing dwarves from the director, who feel their man has gone soft and sold out to the very platitudes he once so boldly exposed.

As a matter of fact, I have tried to evaluate this predictable charge as objectively as I possibly can: the second time I watched the film, I imagined it had been made by some smarmy feelgood director, say, the guy who did The Incredible Journey — you know, the one where the dogs and the cat get lost and find their way home. My conclusion was this: that even if some smarmy director had made this film, I'd have been just as delighted and surprised (though for different reasons) at how good a movie it was: a film beautiful, deep and true in ways that Disney seems to have forgotten (if they ever really knew) how to make. Truths in the mouth of Happy Meal prizes can seem false; truths in the mouths of characters depicted — not with an eye to spin off products — but with ordinary integrity (be it ever so humble) can blow the cobwebs out of those platitudes, and make us remember why they came to be "oft-repeated" in the first place."

As the old saw goes, "the fundamental things apply".

Still, the question remains: what's up with David Lynch anyway? Has he lost his stomach for exploring the Shady Side of Main Street, and is now retiring to the Sunny Side? Or could this excavator of our ideals have discovered a new strata — that there is more below the surface of ideals than violence and absurdity — provided you dig deep enough. That, yes, below images of human innocence and ideals one may find sordidness — but under sordidness, one may unearth forgiveness and love.

Maybe Lynch identifies with Alvin Straight, who is told early in the film by his doctor that "If you don't make some changes quickly there will be some serious consequences." Of course, Alvin's expression suggests he understands the irony of this reprimand: that no matter what he does the consequences are serious—he is going to die, and sooner rather than later. Could it be that this film's overhanging sense of autumn reflects the perspective of the aging Lynch who, now in his mid-fifties, understands that he does not have forever, and so needs to make peace with the world from which he has so long been estranged?

On the other hand, there is good reason to be estranged from this world: much of what David Lynch has had to say about the shady side of Main Street has been all-too-convincing. Clearly, this world is twisted — everybody knows that. Right? Well, to paraphrase C.S. Lewis, we can't know this world is twisted unless we "have some idea of a straight line." And one thing that separates Lynch from many a twisted contemporary filmmaker is that he knows his films and this world are twisted: whatever else they suggest, Lynch's movies have always also suggested that the director has a knowledge of what is straight. And whether this digger-below-surfaces is bold enough to probe deeper the implications of his own unshakeable sense of "straightness" remains to be seen; Lynch's pilgrimage is a work in progress.

Meanwhile, Alvin Straight's journey is over; he died two years after completing his lawn mower pilgrimage. What happened after he arrived, the film does not detail. But, as Woody Allen says, "Eighty percent of success is showing up." Alvin Straight, whatever else he did in his long life, "showed up" when his own personal harvest time rolled around. He fought the good fight, he finished the race. And his story makes for the best Disney film in a long, long time. It could be that The Straight Story isn't quite as good as last year's wonderful road picture, Central Station — but then again it may seem that way only because the latter film was virtually Hollywood-polished, while Lynch's gem is rough hewn and understated. I would argue, however, that The Straight Story is better than 1989's Best Picture, Driving Miss Daisy, or, for that matter, anything George Romaro has ever made.

And can't wait to see how Michael Eisner introduces David Lynch to his Sunday evening audience when this wonderful film finally gets shown on TV's The Wonderful World of Disney.