What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993)
Directed by Lasse Hallström

Film Review

What does it take to be a good person?  That is the question that Swedish director Lasse Hallström prompts us to mull over in What's Eating Gilbert Grape, his most thoughtfully engaging film to date.   It was with his first feature My Life as a Dog (1985) that Hallström succeeded in moving on from his heady music video days (promoting the pop group ABBA in the mid-to-late 1970s), but it was his downbeat portrayal of a dysfunctional Iowa family that brought him international renown in the early 1990s.  The film was not a great commercial success but critical reaction to it was almost universally positive, providing a boost not only for its director but also its two promising male leads - Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio.  Both actors received considerable acclaim for their work on the film, a prelude to the far greater successes that would soon come their way.  Depp and Hallström had a subsequent international hit with Chocolat (2000).

Peter Hedges does a fine job of adapting his 1991 novel of the same title, turning what could so easily have been a pretty gruesome black comedy into something far worthier - a profound and deeply compassionate morality play on the limits of individual responsibility.  At the heart of What's Eating Gilbert Grape is a conflicted young man (Johnny Depp at his absolute best, despite the ostentatiously dyed hair) who brutally neglects his own needs by taking on a far greater share of his family's problems than he is physically and psychologically equipped to deal with.  Gilbert's failing is not that he is - as he seems to think - doing too little, but rather that he is pathologically incapable of recognising his own limitations.  Just as he is manifestly incapable of arresting the physical decline of the building he and his family are living in, he is equally unable to deal with the stresses and strains resulting from having to take care of a morbidly obese mother and a mentally retarded teenage brother, both of whom place extraordinary demands on a youngster who has yet to complete his transition to adulthood.

Hallström's direction may be prosaic and understated but it is powerfully expressive of the bitter undercurrents that are slowly eating away at Gilbert and his siblings.  The daily challenges that the latter have to cope with could just as easily have found their way into a hard-hitting realist drama, but Hallström's approach is relentlessly - and wisely - matter-of-fact.  His slice-of-life is sweet but not saccharine.  So what if Gilbert's mom looks like a stranded whale and can't get out of the seat she has been stuck in for the past decade and a half?  What does it matter that little Arnie keeps making an exhibition of himself by climbing up to the town's water tower in full view of a crowd needing a cheap thrill?  Gilbert takes everything in his stride - and so do we.  It is the everyday normality of the Grape family's life that preoccupies us, not the eccentricities that set them apart.  As we get to know the Grapes we soon get over the shock of the graphically overweight momma and the dribbling mentally disabled teenager and see them as a cohesive family unit, with the selfless elder son Gilbert muddling through as best he can without so much as a hint of resentment.

Is Gilbert Grape too good to be true?  Certainly, Depp's sensitive portrayal of the character makes him irresistibly likeable.  When Gilbert slips up it is inevitably for a good reason.  Arnie is such a handful that his carer could be forgiven for failing him once in a while.  But look a little closer and we see that Gilbert is more flawed than he himself realises.  By going out of his way to protect his problematic family Gilbert is neglecting his own needs, thereby adding to the pressures that make his well-meaning efforts increasingly ineffective and fraught.  Arnie's morbid fear of water is something Gilbert has learned to cope with, until the day comes when he becomes distracted by his first serious love affair.  Now, his mind elsewhere, the good older brother loses his temper and resorts to outright violence to coerce his helpless sibling into the bath tub.  Gilbert's saintliness isn't real.  It is a delusion he clings to because of his misguided and childish notion of duty, which he uses to mask his deep-seated personal inadequacies.  It takes an event as enormous as the sudden death of his mother and the horrible humiliation that this threatens in its wake to provide Gilbert with the jolt he needs to grow up and take responsibility for himself as well as those he loves.

One of the most insightful character studies to be found in American cinema of the 1990s, What's Eating Gilbert Grape excels in both its direction and writing, but what makes it particularly memorable are the performances from an exceptionally gifted cast.  Within just a few years of his big screen debut, Johnny Depp had pretty well cornered the American market in cute odd-ball outsiders, through his work on Edward Scissorhands (1990) and Benny & Joon (1993).  As Gilbert Grape, Depp's acting idiosyncrasies acquired a much deeper humanity and allowed him to progress to a far wider repertoire of roles that soon established him as one of the greatest screen actors of his generation.  But even here, in a film in what he gives one of his most committed performances, Depp comes perilously close to being out-shone by his younger and far less-experienced co-star, a 19-year-old and comparatively unknown Leonardo DiCaprio.

As Depp's severely mentally handicapped younger brother Arnie, DiCaprio virtually steals the film, so blisteringly authentic is his performance, which he based on close observation of mentally ill teenagers in a specialist institution.  It is the heart-tugging reality of Arnie's childlike behaviour that makes Depp's far more restrained performance so powerful and moving.  DiCaprio was duly nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar and, on a wave of critical acclaim, was destined for stardom after such a promising start to his career.  The film's other unforgettable performance comes from Darlene Cates, making her screen debut as the Grape brothers' morbidly obese mother.  Peter Hedges stated he chose her for the part, having seen her in Too Heavy to Leave Their House, an episode of the popular American talk-show Sally broadcast in 1992.  In just a few scenes, and with a minimum of dialogue, Cates manages to get across not only the causes of her character's excessive weight gain but how she feels about her present situation, including her desperate yearning to regain her former zest for life.  In a film that abounds with irreproachable subtlety, Darlene Cates's performance has a special subtlety of its own, with a sharp poignancy that stirs the spectator's feelings far more than the initial shock of her physical appearance.

What's Eating Gilbert Grape is a film that appeals as much to the eye as it does to the emotions, and how could it not with the inordinately talented Sven Nykvist taking charge of its cinematography?  Nykvist is best known for his work on Ingmar Bergman's enduring masterpieces - Winter Light (1963), Persona (1966), Cries and Whispers (1972) and Fanny and Alexander (1982) - but he also worked with a range of other free-spirited auteurs, from Louis Malle (Black Moon) to Woody Allen (Another Woman).  Gilbert Grape was the first of Nykvist's collaborations with Lasse Hallström (followed by Something to Talk About in 1995) and is distinguished by some incredibly beautiful panoramic shots that add greatly to the film's under-emphasised but deeply resonant poetry.  Most potent is a distant shot of the Grape homestead silhouetted against a blazing sunset.  At one point in the film, Gilbert comments that, from a distance, it seems impossible that a person as big as his mother could fit in such a modest structure.  Confronted with the same picture, the spectator later has a different impression - how could such an insignificant little house contain within it such a huge volume of personal drama?  The paradox is made even more apparent when the Grapes' worldly possessions are laid before us in the foreground as the building goes up in smoke in the distance.

Film Synopsis

The Grapes are an ordinary family leading an ordinary life in Endora, an insignificant little town in Iowa.  Since his father's suicide more than a decade ago Gilbert Grape has had his hands full getting his family through no end of minor crises.  The doctors said that his mentally handicapped younger brother Arnie wouldn't live past ten, but now he is almost 18 and so full of life that Gilbert has difficulty keeping him out of harm's way.  With his morbidly obese mother unable to move from the sofa where she spends her days constantly eating and watching television, Gilbert keeps up with the household repairs whilst his younger sisters Amy and Ellen take on all of the domestic duties.  Working at a small grocery shop, Gilbert's duties include making home deliveries to customers, one of whom, Betty Carver, has an extra-marital affair with him to stave off terminal boredom.

Temporarily stranded in the town until her broken Harvester Travelall is repaired, a young woman named Becky strikes up a friendship with Gilbert and his troublesome but likeable younger brother.  Distracted by his growing interest in Becky, Gilbert has less time and patience for Arnie, with the result that he is shamed by both his mother and his sisters for what seems to them a streak of wanton cruelty.  He manages to repair the damage as Arnie celebrates his 18th birthday but his mother dies in her sleep a short while later, having made a colossal effort to climb the staircase to the bedroom she hasn't set foot in since her husband's death.  Unable to face the prospect of seeing his mother's corpse lifted out of the upstairs room on a crane, Gilbert decides to give her a more respectful send-off by burning down the old house.  In doing so, he allows himself and his siblings a chance to move on with their lives and make a fresh start.