It shows Lynch's creative personality, like his protagonist, to be mature, unhurried and still happily subversive. The film flatters him as a proud, flannel-wearing Jack Kerouac, trapped by age but on the road to restore his dignity. He's lost his driver's license, his hips are bad and he uses two canes. So traveling on a John Deere rider mower with an attached trailer the 240 miles along U.S. Highway 18 from Laurens, Iowa, to Blue River in Grant County becomes an act of liberation, independence and defiance. With a smile of satisfaction on his face, he travels at a pace that most people could walk comfortably, past cornfields and clapboard houses.
Bicyclists speed by.
He cooks hot dogs over a campfire, sleeps in his cramped trailer and philosophizes with strangers. His hat blowing off is an action scene in a film that is about the journey, not the destination. Mortality is etched beneath the unshaved stubble on Farnsworth's face, and fear and love show in the eyes of the freckled Sissy Spacek, as his developmentally slow, chain-smoking, stuttering daughter. Appeared in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Oct. 22, 1999.