On a couple of levels, at least, Lasse Hallstrom’s What’s Eating Gilbert Grape is a failure. It certainly doesn’t work as a Hollywood-style romance – despite the film’s publicity that crows about Juliette Lewis playing “the girl who turns [Gilbert’s] life around.” This movie is actually far more subtle and realistic than that. And it also doesn’t follow another formula that the publicists obviously wish it did – this isn’t your usual ‘nice guy pulls himself up by his bootstraps to become a winner’ sort of film. Again, the movie – written by Peter Hedges from his own novel – is far more like real life than it is consistent with the formula, so it’s likely to be off-putting both for movie studio publicists and for moviegoers who demand that their films obediently follow Hollywood’s well-establish unwritten rules.
The story revolves around Gilbert (Johnny Depp) and his mentally-handicapped brother Arnie (Leonardo DiCaprio), in an impressive performance that earned him an Academy Award nomination). The two live with their sisters and their widowed mom in a rundown house in small-town Nowhereville, USA. The family is struggling with Arnie’s situation – he’s nearing adulthood physically, but mentally functions like a small child – and with the fallout from the long-ago suicide of the father. Gilbert and Arnie’s mother (nicely played by newcomer Darlene Cates) has withdrawn from the world since his death, not leaving the house for the better part of a decade and eating so much that her weight – in the region of 500 pounds – has put the stability of the family home at risk.
The movie isn’t built around a single huge conflict, but rather a series of smaller real-life-like events, including the arrival of Becky (Lewis), an appealing young woman passing through on vacation, Arnie’s disturbing habit of wandering off and climbing extremely high structures, and Gilbert’s dalliance with a terribly lost older married woman (Mary Steenburgen has played similar roles several times – including in My Life As a House – and while the parts – including here – aren’t written with the depth she deserves, Steenburgen always manages to make the character slightly silly but also extremely sad). There are little conflicts galore, but no single big issue to be resolved, except for the quiet one – is Gilbert going to find more meaning in his life or simply spend it all keeping an eye on his brother between shifts of stocking the shelves at the local general store.
It’s disarming how What’s Eating Gilbert Grape ambles along as a good-natured family drama, focusing on the Grape family’s substantial quirks and challenges, but never choosing melodrama over reality or simple tying-up of loose ends over authenticity. The main players are strong – Depp as a tremendously low-key Gilbert, Lewis as an equally restrained Becky, and DiCaprio, who is remarkably successful at staying in character throughout. Most of the secondary characters are mildly quirky (and played by mildly quirky actors such as John C. Reilly and Crispin Glover), which adds to the fun and low-key unpredictability of things.
As you watch, you may be nagged by a feeling that something’s missing – that the movie just doesn’t seem to be hitting on all the cylinders that other movies tend to hit on. This is indeed true, but ultimately I don’t think this is a bad thing at all. If you think it through, I suspect that you’ll eventually conclude that the only things absent from What’s Eating Gilbert grape are predictability and emotional manipulation. As a formula movie, it is a failure. As an interesting and likeable piece of offbeat filmmaking, it’s a very pleasant – if modest – success.
