Advantages: Characters, Story. Disadvantages: A little slow to begin with.
It's quite easy to dismiss What's Eating Gilbert Grape as being another clichéd love story if you choose to judge the film purely for its tagline "a film about the love you find... in the last place you look." If you choose to venture deeper, beyond the fairytale publicity, you will find that this film is actually a lot more realistic than the headlines attempt to make out.
What's Eating Gilbert Grape is a family story with plenty of surprises, based on the novel by Peter Hedges. Gilbert (Johnny Depp) is in charge of caring for his mentally handicapped brother, Arnie (Leonardo DiCaprio), while his sisters cook and clean for their 500-pound Mother (Darlene Cates). After the death of their Father a number of years ago, Gilbert has (reluctantly) been promoted to the male head of the Grape family. He also has to work at a local food store ...
Advantages: A Beautiful Moving Film Disadvantages: None
What's Eating Gilbert Grape, is a story of the title character who looks after his mother, brother and two sisters in the home that their father built just before he was 'hung out to dry' 17 years earlier in Endora, Iowa, 'where nothing ever much happens and nothing will.'
Mama (Darlene Cates) used to be the 'prettiest gal in these parts' but is now a 600lb mountain of a woman and who hasn't stepped out of the front door for at least seven years and whose oversized proportions play havoc with the infrastructure of the house they still live in.
Gilbert's (Johnny Depp) younger brother Arnie (Leonardo Di Caprio) is mentally handicapped and was never expected to survive much beyond childhood, and may not much longer. In fact, it could be any day now. As Gilbert sums it up in one line, 'Sometimes you want him to live. And sometimes you ...
Advantages: Fantastic acting, moving, emotional Disadvantages: No real plot line
What's Eating Gilbert Grape? is the story of a family living in a small town in the middle of nowhere.
It stars a young Johnny Depp as main character Gilbert, who sees himself as being the head of the household after his father killed himself a few years back. Of course, this is no ordinary household - his mother hasn't left the house in seven years and is therefore frequently described by Gilbert as being a whale, and his younger brother Arnie (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) is mentally disabled, to the extent that according to the specialists, he should already be dead.
This film is an odd one in that, well, not much seems to really happen. There is no main plot to the story, it is more of a look at daily life for the family. This is exactly the sort of movie that I normally dislike and question why I am bothering - but this ...
