Here's Eric Blume to celebrate the 25th anniversary of What's Eating Gilbert Grape, currently available for rental on most services...
It's now been a quarter century since the release of Lasse Hallstrom’s What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. That deeply felt family drama earns its tears not through sentimentality but through true sentiment. It’s arguably Hallstrom’s best film, and likely the best performances Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCaprio have ever given. I'm happy to report, after a recent revisit, that it only looks better with age.
Hallström lays out the canvas of these characters’ lives with none of the condescension or cliché that we often see in films about small-town America, and he keeps everything fizzy and surprising...
He locks into a tone that’s truly seriocomic: the stakes and the feelings are big, but nothing becomes oppressive or self-serious. The Swedish director lost his grip on tone by the time the dreadful Cider House Rules came around (to an inexplicable 7 Oscar nominations and 2 wins), but here you can see all of Hallström’s humanity; he loves these characters, these actors, and scene after scene is sparked to robust life by a feeling of happy collaboration.
Given the last ten years of Depp’s career, it almost seems unfathomable now to remember that he was once one of our most promising and daring actors, before he fully succumbed to stunts, caricature, and paychecks. Depp lets you feel the weight of Gilbert’s anxiety and guilt, his embarrassment and fear. His life is a trap that seems to have no way out… but the performance never feels too heavy. His romance with new girl in town Juliette Lewis also feels supple and real. She’s freaky in a way that feels both familiar and different to him, and Depp and Lewis fly high in their scenes together. Watching them made me pine to see them go head to head in a movie together today, one that's worthy of and revitalizes their astonishing raw talent.
And seeing DiCaprio in this movie delivers a similarly intense nostalgia. The wild abandon with which DiCaprio throws himself into the character of Arnie, Gilbert’s mentally handicapped younger brother, is still thrilling all these years on. DiCaprio’s performance is unadorned, without a trace of the self-consciousness he developed in his Oscar-hunting years. Arnie is a full, living, breathing creation that the then 18 year-old actor must have spent a great deal of time mastering technically, yet onscreen this star turn is light as a feather. He takes a role that could be very fussy and overblown and keeps it simple and honest, never cheating or breaking character: he’s electrifying.
The relationship of all of the Grape children (Laura Harrington and Mary Kate Schelhardt, as the sisters, are also fantastic) to their mother remains the centerpiece of the film. Darlene Cates, who died last year and never had another major film role, slays in this movie. Too big to move, she spends most of her screen time on a couch but packs so much power into her scenes that she brings the movie into another dimension. Her scene where she tells Depp he’s her “knight in shimmering armour” pierces my heart every time. In lesser hands that sort of line and scene would beheavy-handed and cloying, but instead feels intimate and true.
What’s Eating Gilbert Grape is a personal favorite. Twenty-five years later it's now lightning in a bottle in terms of its young cast working at the peak of their powers. This story of acceptance, redemption, and freedom only becomes more touching with time.