Movie Review – What's Eating Gilbert Grape

What’s Eating Gilbert Grape – (1993) Gilbert is a young man with a dead end life in a dead end town in Iowa.  He helps care for his morbidly obese mother (Darlene Cates), and his mentally challenged brother Arne (Leonardo DiCaprio) with his two sisters.  Meanwhile a customer at the grocery store where Gilbert works (Mary Steenburgen) is fighting her own battle with a dead end life by having an affair with Gilbert.  One day a trailer on its way west breaks down and Gilbert meets Becky (Juliette Lewis) and discovers that there might be a life beyond what he can see.

This movie is from the days when your head was suddenly snapping around when the name of Johnny Depp was mentioned.  He had done some small roles in movies and been a heart throb star on the television series “21 Jump Street”.  With 1990’s “Edward Scissorhands” we all began to look at Depp differently.  It also set the standard for his eclectic decision making in role selection.  In ’93 he would make both this movie and “Bennie and Joon”, then in 1994 make “Ed Wood” and “Don Juan DeMarco”.  At that point it was clear this was a young actor worth keeping an eye on.  Twenty years later he still is.  When you’re willing to take the kind of chances Depp does you don’t always land winners.  Consistently he make movies with interesting characters and stories.  That’s no small thing.

Yet in this movie his performance is not the one you will walk away talking about.  That credit goes to Leonardo DiCaprio.  Like Depp he had done some small movie roles and a couple stints on TV (“Growing Pains” and “Parenthood”) before moving over to films full time.  While it was “Titanic” four years later that would launch him into stardom, this movie shows some serious performance chops.  His mentally challenged Arne is completely believable (I went back and double checked this was in fact DiCaprio while I was watching the movie), with both depth and nuance.  It’s pretty impressive for an actor of any age.  For a nineteen year old with a background in bit roles and sitcoms, it’s a stunning turn.

There’s not a lot of complexity to the story.  The complexity is in how Gilbert navigates the relationships in a very small town at first and the added options when Becky arrives in his life.  The characters feel real, the stress of their lives reads true and it makes for a movie that draws you in quietly.  Director Lasse Halstrom (MY Life As A Dog”, “Chocolat”, “The Shipping News” and “The Hundred Foot Journey” among many others) does a wonderful job of combining distinctive visual choices with a simple unfolding of the story.

I didn’t quite know what to expect when I started “What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?”.  In the end I got so much more than I had hoped for.

Rating – **** Recommended