What's Eating Gilbert Grape? (1993)

Well word has reached me about Leonardo DiCaprio getting high praise for The Reverant. And I intend to see it sometime soon, but until then, here's a film my family and I recently saw that has another big performance from the guy.

Plot: Gilbert is a young man who works as a clerk at a grocery store in a sleepy town called Endora. He lives this occupying life where he looks after his morbidly obese mother and his brother with a developmental disability, Arnie. Gilbert tries to juggle taking care of his family and prepare for Arnie's 18th birthday party, while he tries to gain a love life with a girl named Becky.

This is a moving film. It captures the world of this quiet, dead-end town, and you feel what an impact it is to people who live there. It does however have some predictable moments. There are elements to the story where you can probably figure out for yourself what is going to happen, or get a good idea of part of how the movie will end. A lot of that is from the fault of how the film sets up the characters and their relationships with one another. For example, one of the very first things that Gilbert says via voice over at the very beginning of the movie, is how it's a surprise that Arnie has stayed alive when he was expected to die before he was 10. I'm not really giving anything away when I say that though, because the film doesn't necessarily give anything away either when it gives us exposition like that. It sort of plays around with our expectations, so we still have the mystery of whether or not something is going to happen. In the end, how the story ends, might be what you expected, thought not entirely.

This is also one of these films that leads to look back and ask "what the heck happened to Johnny Depp as an actor?" This is one of those performances that we need to see him in more often; something more serious and dramatic and more original where we can take his acting seriously as opposed to performances that are basically just Tim Burton films and movies that he more or less gets casted in based on his eccentric performance as Captain Jack Sparrow in the Pirate films. Here, we get the struggle that Gilbert is going through and feel for how he is trapped because of how he has to take care of his family after the death of his father. Leonardo DiCaprio gives the most stand-out performance that I have ever seen him do. He gives an excellent performance giving us this mentally challenged boy from the movements, to the way he talks, to the facial expressions - heck, throughout most of the entire film, I don't even see him as DiCaprio. I see him as this poor, mentally challenged boy named Arnie. That's kind of a rare feet for him in my opinion. As good of an actor he is, he is sort of one of those people where in the long run, you see DiCaprio as this character, instead of just seeing the character. So it's nice to see a film where the latter happens when we see DiCaprio. Granted, sometimes he comes off as a little annoying, but it's also the reasonable kind of annoying, in that this is a character that had mental problems, and thus he can't help how he may acts around people.


And that's my review for What's Eating Gilbert Grape? It has its predictable moments, but it otherwise delivers a nice, film with some of the best performances from Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio. If you haven't seen it and you feel like watching something decent on Netflix, this is not a bad film to check out.

Rating:70%