Movie Review Whats Eating Gilbert Grape

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Spoiler alerts 1993 A wonderful human drama, with humour while not descending into outright comedy, and sadness without aiming for tragedy or pathos. Gilbert Grape (Johnny Depp) is a very burdened young man, looking after his agoraphobic 36 stone mother and his severely mentally handicapped younger brother, played astonishingly well by a young Leonardo Di Capprio (cruelly losing out on the best supporting actor award to Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive – one of the greatest injustices ever committed in Academy Awards history). The boy was expected to die before he reached ten but the film centres on events leading to his eighteenth birthday party, though it is sensed that he could still perish at any time. Gilbert gets little help from his sisters while Arnie (Di Capprio) is defiant and playfully mischievous, creating hell whenever he has to take a bath, and climbing up trees and the town very tall water-cooler whenever his brother’s attention is diverted. The mother’s weight is a threat to the very floor of their cabin-house, and Gilbert struggles to reinforce the floorboards in the cellar where his father committed suicide, unaware that he reflects the same depressive state of mind that is stretching to breaking point. The sense of a house, family, town, and business community all just about holding themselves together all echoes the state of Gilbert’s mind as he performs the impossible task of caring for everyone round him to the point of suppressing his own dreams and needs. The town itself is going nowhere. The local convenience store Gilbert works in part time can’t cope with the giant hypermarket in the next town. Gilbert has a doomed clandestine relationship with the wife of a local insurance salesman, but her husband’s death which may be accidental, stress related suicide or murder by his wife) ends that. A new girl arrives in town though, a wild nomadic wanderer, played by Juliette Lewis, a girl who loves sunsets. If she wants to swim she just jumps in the river clothes and all. She has the freedom and optimism Gilbert lacks and in sharing Arnie’s sense of innocent fun, she impresses the boy too, but Gilbert is restrained in how much time he can dedicate to her because of the extreme needs of his family. It will explode in an act of violent rage that could have proved destructive, but it wakens his family to seeing that he too has strains and tensions that cannot be ignored – the finale of the movie is heart-warming and liberating rather than bittersweet and distressing. A study of dysfunction and trapped values that isn’t played for laughs or horror, but with calm realism and ultimately, even the dignified departure of the mother figure and how the family handle their loss is strangely wonderful and uplifting rather than tearful. Though centred on Depp’s central characterisation (itself well played as is the entire movie) it is Di Capprio’s Arnie who stands out as one of the most exceptional performances ever screened, a big surprise to anyone who first discovered him from Titanic. Arthur Chappell