Lasse Hallström’s What’s Eating Gilbert Grape arrived in 1993 with a tagline that told you exactly what kind of film it wanted to be: “Life is a terrible thing to sleep through.” The film stars Johnny Depp as Gilbert Grape, a grocery store clerk in the fictional rural town of Endora, Iowa, who is raising his younger brother Arnie while his mother Bonnie, played by Darlene Cates, has not left the house in seven years. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Arnie, who is about to turn 18. It runs 118 minutes and holds a Metacritic aggregate score of 73/100, which corresponds to 7.3/10.
Trailer, via YouTube Movies.
Endora, Iowa, and the Airstreamers
The film is set in a small town that tourists pass through rather than stop in. An annual Airstreamers’ Club gathering brings trailers through Endora, and Gilbert and Arnie watch them pass. Endora is a place people leave. Gilbert is not one of them.
His father went bankrupt seventeen years before the events of the film and died by suicide two years after the bankruptcy. The family has been rearranging itself around that absence ever since. Bonnie spends her days on the couch, eating and watching television. Her obesity leaves her unable to care for the children on her own, and Gilbert has taken on many of her responsibilities. He does repairs on the family house. He is protective of Arnie, who often climbs trees and the town’s water tower.
Sisters Amy and Ellen help with the housework. The oldest brother, Larry, has moved away. That is the household: a mother who cannot leave, a brother who will not stay put, two sisters holding the middle, and Gilbert doing the work nobody else can.
Lamson’s Grocery and the FoodLand Problem
Gilbert works at Lamson’s Grocery, a small store threatened by a new FoodLand supermarket that has opened in town. Endora is not dying of anything dramatic. It is dying of a FoodLand.
Peter Hedges wrote the screenplay, based on his own 1991 novel, and the grocery store thread is where the film’s sense of place is sharpest. Gilbert is having an affair with a married woman, Betty Carver, played by Mary Steenburgen, to whom he delivers groceries. The deliveries are the job. The affair is something else.
Filming took place from November 1992 to January 1993 in various parts of Texas, standing in for Iowa. The flatness reads correctly. So does the way the town’s landmarks — the water tower, the grocery, the house — become the whole map of a life.
Becky and the Travelall
Juliette Lewis plays Becky, a young woman who is stuck in town with her grandmother when the International Harvester Travelall pulling their trailer breaks down. Penelope Branning plays Becky’s Grandma. Becky is free-spirited in the way the film needs her to be: not a solution to Gilbert’s life, but a reason to look at it.
Gilbert begins a romance with her. That romance costs him. He leaves Arnie alone in the bath to spend time with Becky. When he returns home late and finds Arnie still in the bath, shivering, he is guilt-ridden, the family is angry, and Arnie has developed aquaphobia. It is the film’s cleanest piece of cause and effect, built entirely from a brother’s ordinary failure of attention.
Then Gilbert is again distracted by Becky. Arnie scales the water tower and has to be rescued. Bonnie leaves the house for the first time in seven years to demand his release at the police station — the source does not say what charges he faced or how the matter was resolved. Darlene Cates plays that scene without asking for sympathy, and the film is better for it.
Arnie Turns 18
As Arnie’s 18th approaches, his behavior deteriorates. He ruins two birthday cakes and refuses to bathe. Gilbert loses his patience, hits Arnie, then flees in his truck overcome by guilt. Arnie seeks help from Becky, who helps him overcome his fear of water.
This is the spine of the film, and DiCaprio carries it. At age 19, DiCaprio received his first nominations for the Academy Award and Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. The performance is not a stunt. Arnie is a person with a will, and the film keeps letting him have one.
Depp’s Gilbert is the harder part to notice, because Gilbert is the one doing the noticing. He is tired in a way that never announces itself. He is not a martyr and the film does not make him one. He is a young man who has been handed a life and has not yet decided what he thinks about it.
The Cast Around the Center
The supporting cast fills Endora without cluttering it. John C. Reilly plays Tucker Van Dyke. Crispin Glover plays Bobby McBurney. Kevin Tighe plays Mr. Carver. Laura Harrington and Mary Kate Schellhardt play Amy and Ellen. Tim Green plays Mr. Lamson, the man whose grocery is losing.
The film is a romance and a drama, and it is honest about how little those two things have to do with each other in a town this size. Betty Carver is an affair, not a future. Becky is a future that may not stay. Arnie is a permanent fact. Bonnie is a permanent fact. The house is a permanent fact.
Life is a terrible thing to sleep through.
That tagline is the film’s thesis, and it is also its limitation. What’s Eating Gilbert Grape is very good at waking Gilbert up. It is less interested in what he does once he is awake. The source material does not describe how the film ends.
What the Film Gets Right
The film was well received, with Depp’s and DiCaprio’s performances garnering critical acclaim. That reputation has held. DiCaprio’s nominations at 19 are the headline, and they are deserved. But the film’s real achievement is structural: it never lets Gilbert’s resentment become the point. He is not owed anything by Endora, and the film does not pretend otherwise.
The weaknesses are real. The Becky romance does its job and then leaves. Bonnie’s arc — seven years inside, then a walk to the police station — is the film’s best idea, and it gets less screen time than it should. Cates makes the most of what she is given. She is not given enough.
Hallström directs with restraint. He does not push the water tower, the bath, or the birthday cakes past what they can carry. The film trusts its actors, and its actors are worth trusting.
What’s Eating Gilbert Grape is a coming-of-age drama that understands the age in question is not eighteen. Gilbert is older than that. He is coming of age as a caretaker, which is a different and slower thing. The film knows that. It just does not always know what to do with it.
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