by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
While the Grammy Awards were on in the first place, on
Sunday, February 11, my new client Ken showed me a quite remarkable movie from
his collection: What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?, one of those small-town dramas that sometimes seems to be drowning in
its own quirks but nonetheless makes an effect and is genuinely moving. What’s
Eating Gilbert Grape? is dated 1993 on
imdb.com but was actually released a year later than that, and it was made by
Swedish director Lasse Hallström but based on a novel by American writer Peter
Hedges, who also got to do the screenplay. What’s Eating Gilbert
Grape? is set in the tiny rural town of
Endora (was it deliberately named after Agnes Moorhead’s
mother-in-law-from-hell, literally,
character on the 1960’s TV series Bewitched?), whose location is ambiguous even though the movie
was filmed in and around Austin, Texas. Gilbert Grape (Johnny Depp in his
youthful, long-haired prime —though he turned up on the Grammy Awards with
similarly long hair and not looking all that different) is the put-upon second
son of Bonnie Grape (Darlene Cates). At least 15 years before (Depp, narrating
the film in character, says 17 years, but if it’s been that long, just who
fathered his 15-year-old sister?) Gilbert’s dad hanged himself in the family
basement, and the once-beautiful Bonnie went to seed, never left the house
again and eventually blew up to an enormous size. The pre-release promotion on
this movie went to great lengths to explain that, rather than take a
normal-sized actress and body-pad her to the character’s ultra-zaftig proportions, director Hallström and his casting
people (Jo Edna Boldin, Hal Masonberg and Bronni Stein) actually found a woman
as big as the character and cast her, though according to imdb.com she was once
small enough that actual photos of the young Darlene Cates were used as the
pre-transformation pictures of Bonnie Grape.
The other members of Gilbert’s
dysfunctional family are his younger brother Arnie (a young and almost
unrecognizable Leonardo DiCaprio), who’s suffering from a mystery illness that
could kill him at any time, though it doesn’t seem to affect him physically —
he has a mania for climbing trees and the town’s water tower — and its main
effect is psychological: he’s — what is the politically correct euphemism these days? “Learning-disabled”? —
and his sister Amy (Laura Harrington). Gilbert is a clerk at the town grocer,
whose business is being killed by the Foodland (read: Walmart) big-box store
that has just opened up the street, and he also does deliveries. One of his
delivery clients, Betty Carver (Mary Steenburgen), is having one of those older
woman/younger man affairs with him that seems an obligatory coming-of-age ritual
in rural-set movies these days, though there’s a grimly amusing scene in which
Gilbert has to stop one of their trysts in mid-fuck when he sees Betty’s
husband, insurance salesman Ken Carver (Kevin Tighe), bouncing up and down on a
trampoline in a position that just might enable him to spy on his wife making
it with the grocery boy. Eventually Gilbert finds a sort-of girlfriend his own
age, Becky (Juliette Lewis) — I liked the irony that she had her hair in a sort
of butch crewcut while Gilbert was wearing his considerably longer — who lives
in one of the campers that drives into town during the tourist season and which
Gilbert and Arnie get one of the few kicks of their lives watching. It took me
a while to realize it but, while there are virtually no plot similarities
between What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?
and It’s a Wonderful Life, Johnny
Depp’s character here is quite similar to James Stewart’s in Frank Capra’s
classic: a small-town boy with visions of leaving (Gilbert has an older brother
who actually did leave, though
all we see of him is a framed photo in a military uniform) and making his way
in the broader world, but whose plans are constantly being interrupted by the
needs of his family and friends. It’s the sort of movie that’s stronger in its parts
than in the whole, though Hedges’ script is carefully “planted” with clues
whose significance becomes apparent as the film takes place.
What one remembers
are individual scenes: the talk of the imminent arrival of “Burger Barn,” a
national fast-food chain whose restaurants come pre-assembled and actually look
like barns (though the obvious inspiration is McDonald’s — down to the
shrieking yellow-and-red uniforms and décor of the establishments, courtesy of a survey the real
McDonald’s owners took to find what colors were psychologically most effective
at getting people to feel hungry — the barn-like appearance reminded me of the
long-defunct Pioneer Chicken, which also ran its restaurants out of barn-like
buildings); the actual appearance of the Burger Barn, interrupting the attempts
to give Ken Carver a suitably solemn funeral; the sick jokes made by the town’s
morticians about the corpses they handle; and the ending that conversation,
which Gilbert overhears, sets up. The film ends with a marvelous suspense
sequence in which Bonnie decides she wants to ascend the stairs of her
two-story home and lay in her bed on the second floor (though according to
imdb.com Darlene Cates only walked up two or three stairs and Hallström
repeated the shot to make it look like she was ascending the whole staircase,
there’s a marvelous will-she-make-it-or-won’t-she? aspect around the whole
scene). She gets into the upstairs bed, only to suffer a heart attack and die,
and rather than let the morticians handle her (he’s already overheard someone
say, “They’re gonna need a crane to get her out of there” — ironically, we’ve
already seen a crane earlier in the movie getting Arnie down from the water
tower he’s climbed) Gilbert decides to burn down the whole house, sacrificing his
living space for the sake of giving his mom a D.I.Y. cremation without letting
those assholes from the mortuary tell sick and nasty jokes about her size. What’s
Eating Gilbert Grape? is a genuinely
touching movie, quirky as all get-out but also oddly moving, and powered by
nicely understated performances by Depp (he’s become a pretty relentless
overacter in a lot of his vehicles since, but in this one he was marvelous),
DiCaprio and Cates (who’s had three credits on imdb.com since, episodes of the
TV series Picket Fences and Touched
by an Angel and playing “Athena the Fat
Lady” in a TV movie called Wolf Girl,
and in August 2012 she announced that she’d slimmed down — relatively — from 575
to 331 pounds and wants to act again).
