Life in the Slow Lane.

ALVIN STRAIGHT is a nice old man living-we don't quite know off what-in Laurens, Iowa, with his daughter Rose, who talks haltingly and whose four children have been taken away from her because she is slightly retarded and because one of them was badly burned in a fire. Alvin says, "She is a little bit slow, but her mind is like a bear trap." Laurens is a small town, and on the sunny day when The Straight Story begins, Main Street is deserted but for four dogs (not together) who bound across it in canine bliss.

Alvin has to be helped up from the floor of his shack by Rose, who finally manages to drag him off to a doctor. He is henceforth to use a walker, eat more judiciously, and stop smoking cigars. For the walker, he substitutes two canes; the rest he ignores. As he and Rose are watching a lightning storm, a phone call from someone informs Rose that Alvin's brother, Lyle, has had a stroke. Although they haven't spoken in ten years, Alvin resolves to visit Lyle in Mt. Zion, Wisconsin, a goodly distance away. His eyes do not permit him to drive a car, so he decides to travel by his lawn mower, to which he attaches a flimsy trailer. The townsfolk think him crazy, his mission impossible. But this is a true story.

The lawn mower conks out fairly promptly, and he returns to buy another model, used but newer. Off he goes again, unperturbed by the fact that whatever moves on the road lets him eat its dust. He carries victuals with him, and doesn't even mind that he rides on a backless seat. Modest adventures befall him. Thus, a surly girl hitchhiker, pregnant and running away from her family, comes upon his supper: roasting wieners on a campfire. He shares his meal and some good advice with her. Another time, he encounters a hysterical woman who has just run over a deer. Its antlers end up on his trailer, its meat lands in his stomach.

When a group of young touring cyclists swarm around him and eventually share a bivouac with him, one of them asks what is worst about getting old. He tells them: Remembering that one was once young. But he is content anyway, driving by day and sleeping by night, and dispensing bits of philosophy here and there, even if the wisdom is often derivative.

People, at least in the Midwest, are wonderfully kind. When his drive belt breaks on a steep incline, he nearly comes to grief. But some good folks from nearby come to his aid. One of them puts him up on his land, and summons a pair of comic repairmen to restore his vehicle. Alvin haggles with them pawkily. At times, the dialogue is very slow, but it always hits home.

It is refreshing, for one thing, to see a film about an old person, many of whose encounters are with other old-timers. For another, the characters have a simple, earthy reality. Pathos is never milked, except perhaps in a barroom episode where Alvin and another geezer reminisce about terrible wartime memories, but even this scene does not go overboard. And the kindness of strangers never turns sappy. The rest is taken care of by the acting, directing, and cinematography.

David Lynch is known for having directed some of the meanest, ugliest films on record; here, suddenly, he goes antithetical, and gives us one of the gentlest movies of recent times. And it works. Even when the pacing dawdles, the camera will be on the face of Richard Farnsworth, that superb 79-year-old actor, equally fascinating in quirkiness and in quietude. And the scenes on the road, amid typical uneventfully flat landscapes, are shot with unfailing eloquence by Freddie Francis, the marvelous 82-year-old British cinematographer (and sometimes director), who manages to wrest a rich palette from wheat, asphalt, and some greenery. Also, the night sky with stars, a poetic leitmotif.

The screenplay by John Roach and the film's editor, Mary Sweeney, is humane and only occasionally a bit weirdly Lynchian, and the usually overwrought composer Angelo Badalamenti remains decently restrained. With Sissy Spacek (Rose) and Harry Dean Stanton (Lyle) leading an utterly believable supporting cast, The Straight Story gets it pretty much right.

Others have also noticed that, from Anna and the King, yet another version of the Anna Leonowens story that became the beloved musical The King and I, something is missing. That something is the Rodgers and Hammerstein score. When Anna, the new English governess, meets the copious brood of King Mongkut of Siam, you expect her to burst into "Getting to Know You." When she doesn't, the jig is just about up.

Such is the power of good musical comedy that once it grabs hold of a story, it doesn't let go. No matter that the king is here played by the Hong Kong superstar Chow Yun-Fat, who, unlike Yul Brynner, commands a full head of hair; no matter that Jodie Foster's Anna is ever so earnest and dedicated, to the point of almost managing a consistent British accent; no matter that this version includes battle footage and other previously unseen elements; no matter even that Luciana Arrighi's heady, on-location production design, Jenny Beavan's opulently authentic costuming, and Caleb Deschanel's fairy-tale-gorgeous cinematography enchant the eye-where, oh, where is the R&H score? George Fenton's background music is only a wooden nickel.

Upon closer look, other things are missing, too. More warmth from Jodie Foster, more idiosyncratic charm from Chow, more chemistry between the two principals, which, for all its churning, the movie fails to deliver. Not even the presence of 19 well-trained elephants makes the film memorable to anyone but an elephant. There are, however, impressive landscapes; they and Mongkut's palace, especially built for the movie, are sights to see. Otherwise, this unhummable Anna remains merely ho-hum.

Neil Jordan gives us a remake of Graham Greene's semiautobiographical novel The End of the Affair, with Stephen Rea, Julianne Moore, and Ralph Fiennes playing, respectively, the husband, the wife, and the friend/lover. This triangle, set against the London Blitz and including even a direct hit on the house where adultery is in progress, makes for the melodrama of tortured conscience and Catholic guilt that was Greene's forte, and Jordan brings it vividly to the screen.

But Jordan must be more Catholic than-not quite the Pope-but Graham Greene, and has more nocturnal rain in his film than even London can usually produce. This, then, is a movie top-heavy with atmosphere, especially since Stephen Rea is always caught without an umbrella-most unlikely for a British civil servant, proverbially well-brollied. There are some fine moments, a plethora of sex, moody cinematography by Roger Pratt; but something is lacking, or too much, for the lay viewer. Moore, an American, impresses with her accent as much as with her acting, and Stephen Rea, in an atypical part, is even better. But Fiennes is becoming a bit of a cliche: the genteel, delicate British romantic lover, capable of outbursts of ever-so-sensitive passion before relapsing into his standard sensitive British dorkiness.