What's Eating Gilbert Grape

365 Films

Entry #28

What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (1993)

Directed by: Lasse Hallström 

What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, Swedish director Lasse Hallström’s quiet drama about a family coping with everyday life in Endora, Iowa is a luminous example of exactly the kind of movie a major studio refuses to make anymore.  The fact that I first saw it on another one of my patented “sick days” only adds to the nostalgic feeling of time passing that always accompanies the film for me.  I can remember the extreme hesitation I had when my Mom suggested the idea of watching it.  I was sick (I think) and being a 10-13 year old boy (I can’t quite place the exact year so bear with me), the idea of giving up a day off from school to watch something where nothing exploded seemed like a foolish idea.  After some gentle convincing, the next two hours passed by with the greatest of ease.  I sat there enraptured with the gentle rhythms of the visual style and by the humanistic style of the performances.  Gilbert Grape is a film that would have very easily fallen into the realm of torrid melodrama.  As a matter of fact, that seems to be the current stock and trade of director Lasse Hallstöm some 20 years later (see: Safe Haven, Dear John, and other assorted titles of ill-repute).  Skills gotta pay the bills as it were.  However, back in the year 1993 BS (Before Sparks) Hollström was able to keenly dial into small town life to such an extent as to tease out the drama rather than wringing it out like water from an old dishrag.  It doesn’t hurt that the cast is positively stellar.  Johnny Depp, whom nobody would consider an ordinary, average joe succeeds remarkably at playing exactly that.  The performance is all the more memorable because of Depp’s staunch refusal to sentimentalize Gilbert or his plight.  He is selfish, ornery, and sometimes flat-out abusive to his family but also gentle, giving, and loving all in the same breath.  The same goes for the rest of the cast, Leonardo DiCaprio was justifiably lauded for his performance as Arnie, and Darlene Cates is heartbreaking as Gilbert’s morbidly obese mother Bonnie.  These two bring an intensity of feeling to the parts that diminish any attempt to reduce and simplify their characters solely down to their disabilities.  It is in that humanity that the filmmakers find a story that while centered in a fictionalized Iowa town could really stand in for anywhere.  The connection hit home particularly for me because I had never seen anything close to an approximation of my hometown up on screen.  Wilmington, Delaware may not have had a general store or a town center crowded with pick-up trucks, but we definitely had people like Gilbert.  What’s sad is that budgetary constraints are not why films like this have gone by the wayside.  These films still exist, they’re just made on a tiny scale and are much more difficult to produce and finally see.  The reason they have vanished from the major studio slate is for the very reason it is justly praised. Its refusal to condescend, its gentle empathy, and its overall appreciation for the epic scope of everyday American life have all but guaranteed its extinction.  I’ll leave the final word to the late, great Harvey Pekar, “Ordinary life is pretty complex stuff.”