I recently stumbled upon the last half of one of those Top 50 Child Stars TV shows, which had a segment on Leonardo DiCaprio, showing interviews with him when he first started acting and would make jokes about how famous and rich he was, having had no way of knowing how astronomically rich and famous he would go on to be. Anyway, the show described his performance in What's Eating Gilbert Grape as one of his most charming, which turned out to be a tremendous understatement.
The film takes place in the motionless town of Endora, Iowa, and concerns the world of Gilbert Grape, whose life is in a constant state of turmoil. He works for a tiny local general store that has come under the competitive strain of a massive supermarket which has opened just outside of town. Needless to say, the store is a major topic of conversation among the local townspeople, because a big store in a town like Endora is big news.
I think the real charm of the movie lies in the fact that it is able to portray what you normally might consider to be a highly dysfunctional family and make them charming and, in the context of the town and world they live in, lovable. All of the problems that the family suffers on a daily basis are right at the forefront throughout the film, but no one ever really seems unhappy, except for the mother, and we get the feeling that her unhappiness is both the cause and the result of her morbid obesity. We get a brief explanation of how she came to be so heavy, but not really much more than, "I wasn't always like this."
Gilbert is about 21 and seems to be the only one mature (and mentally and physically able) enough to hold the family together, and the majority of the movie focuses on his struggles to do that in normal life. He is in charge of his mentally retarded brother Arnie (DiCaprio), has to periodically subdue his intolerably obnoxious sister, who looks like she belongs in a different family and a different society (and she believes that, too), while at the same time getting to work on time, hanging out at coffee shops with his similarly offbeat friends talking about the undertaking business. In between all of this, a local desperate housewife periodically orders groceries for delivery from the general store where he works, and she tends to be a little less desperate after he leaves.
It seems that all of this normality, charming in both its daily routine and its total difference from the daily monotony that the majority of us are used to, is presented to us so that we can get to know Gilbert, his daily life, and his family, as they are before the cataclysmic arrival of Becky (Juliette Lewis). Becky is on a vacation of sorts with her mother and stops in Endora long enough for her and Gilbert to develop a romantic interest in each other, and she thereby breaks the series of monotonies which the first part of the movie introduced us to. Monotonies which may have continued forever had she not arrived.
There are a series of events that take place after Becky arrives as Gilbert tries to assimilate her into his well-established life, testing the waters and taking new risks that he would never have even considered before, and learning something about himself from the results, as we all do.
The Grapes are a family that would very likely knock you off your feet if you were to run into almost any of them in person, but the movie is so good at treating them as humans that they are not a spectacle at all, even when Arnie is repeatedly climbing the local water tower, much to the chagrin of the local police force, who have been promised repeatedly that this is the last time. It never is, and when we see Arnie up there on the tower, we cheer for him, and the reason we cheer for him is the same reason why the movie is so effective.
We don't cheer for him because we identify with his struggle against a couple of grumpy cops, but as though he has made an accomplishment, because in his mind, he has.
The film takes place in the motionless town of Endora, Iowa, and concerns the world of Gilbert Grape, whose life is in a constant state of turmoil. He works for a tiny local general store that has come under the competitive strain of a massive supermarket which has opened just outside of town. Needless to say, the store is a major topic of conversation among the local townspeople, because a big store in a town like Endora is big news.
I think the real charm of the movie lies in the fact that it is able to portray what you normally might consider to be a highly dysfunctional family and make them charming and, in the context of the town and world they live in, lovable. All of the problems that the family suffers on a daily basis are right at the forefront throughout the film, but no one ever really seems unhappy, except for the mother, and we get the feeling that her unhappiness is both the cause and the result of her morbid obesity. We get a brief explanation of how she came to be so heavy, but not really much more than, "I wasn't always like this."
Gilbert is about 21 and seems to be the only one mature (and mentally and physically able) enough to hold the family together, and the majority of the movie focuses on his struggles to do that in normal life. He is in charge of his mentally retarded brother Arnie (DiCaprio), has to periodically subdue his intolerably obnoxious sister, who looks like she belongs in a different family and a different society (and she believes that, too), while at the same time getting to work on time, hanging out at coffee shops with his similarly offbeat friends talking about the undertaking business. In between all of this, a local desperate housewife periodically orders groceries for delivery from the general store where he works, and she tends to be a little less desperate after he leaves.
It seems that all of this normality, charming in both its daily routine and its total difference from the daily monotony that the majority of us are used to, is presented to us so that we can get to know Gilbert, his daily life, and his family, as they are before the cataclysmic arrival of Becky (Juliette Lewis). Becky is on a vacation of sorts with her mother and stops in Endora long enough for her and Gilbert to develop a romantic interest in each other, and she thereby breaks the series of monotonies which the first part of the movie introduced us to. Monotonies which may have continued forever had she not arrived.
There are a series of events that take place after Becky arrives as Gilbert tries to assimilate her into his well-established life, testing the waters and taking new risks that he would never have even considered before, and learning something about himself from the results, as we all do.
The Grapes are a family that would very likely knock you off your feet if you were to run into almost any of them in person, but the movie is so good at treating them as humans that they are not a spectacle at all, even when Arnie is repeatedly climbing the local water tower, much to the chagrin of the local police force, who have been promised repeatedly that this is the last time. It never is, and when we see Arnie up there on the tower, we cheer for him, and the reason we cheer for him is the same reason why the movie is so effective.
We don't cheer for him because we identify with his struggle against a couple of grumpy cops, but as though he has made an accomplishment, because in his mind, he has.