Blast from the Past - "What's Eating Gilbert Grape"

      Have you ever traveled through a small town in middle-America, where there's only one road and everyone wears pastels and it smells like cows and comfort food wherever you go?  And you wonder, "What the hell do these people do with their lives?  And why do they live here?"

      What's Eating Gilbert Grape is a movie that answers that question.  A heart-warming film from 1993 starring Johnny Depp (pre-hunk status) and Leonardo DiCaprio, in probably one of the best performances of his career, Depp plays a very discontented but gentle-spirited young man named Gilbert Grape.  He lives in a small town called Endora with a 500-lb disabled mother that lives at home on the couch, two very misunderstanding sisters that drive him crazy, and a mentally challenged younger brother named Arnie who can't seem to stay away from trouble.  Gilbert works at a grocery store that is being run out of business by a Costco-type grocerer line, and when he's not hanging out with his weird mortician/hamburger aficionado friends Bobby and Tucker, he's making out with a lonely housewife behind her husband's back, or dragging his handicapped brother down from the town's water tower.

     He has a quite a few things "eating" him, as you can tell.  Life in Endora is boring and stressful at the same time for Gilbert; he's restless, and needs a way out of the unwarranted responsibilities of caring for his brother, and the pressure felt at home from three estrogen-charged loud-mouths. But things begin to look up for Gilbert when he meets cute, free-spirited Becky (Juliette Lewis), who is passing through Endora with her grandmother while their cross-country RV gets repaired.  Becky and Gilbert develop a friendship that slowly buds into a quirky romance; Becky begins to open Gilbert's eyes to the possibilities not just in life, but also with the relationships around him, particularly with the two family members he is most angry at - Arnie, for his over-enthusiasm, and his mother Bonnie, for having almost no enthusiasm about anything, unless it's bacon or covered in syrup.

     I'm sorry, but you have to be a douche-bag to hate this movie.  It's so 90s, and more genuine, funny, and better written than half the independent films today.  Every actor, from Crispin Glover as the creepy funeral director to Darlene Cates as the obese matriarch, deserves praise for their roles.  DiCaprio's portrayal of Arnie is phenomenal.  Most actors that take roles for mentally-handicapped characters seem to hold them hostage, demanding an Academy Award as ransom.  DiCaprio is not attention-seeking, exploitative, or ulteriorly motivated. The atmosphere of Endora is as listless as it is interesting and engaging, which would be incredibly hard for a director and/or writer to pull off.  But this is America, and as previously stated, we have all been to towns like Endora.  This story is about the people and families living in them, dying in them, and trying desperately to get out of them.

(image source = movie2s.com)