What's Eating Gilbert Grape

I like to say that I wind up recording more recent movies when I get the free preview weekends from DirecTV, but then, some of the movies are really not all that recent. Closing in on 30 years go, for example, is What's Eating Gilbert Grape. I see that it's on again, tomorrow (April 24) at 1:00 PM on The Movie Channel Xtra if you've got the premium channels. It'll be on again several amore times over the following week.

Johnny Depp plays Gilbert Grape. He's a twentysomething living in the small town of Endora, IA, in a sort of dead-end life. He works at the local grocery store, Lamson's, which has been serving the community since 1932, although it's in financial difficulty now since a new Foodland supermarket has opened up in the next bigger town over. As part of his job, Gilbert gets to make deliveries, this being the era between the pre-supermarket days when grocery stores would still have delivery boys, and the current day with apps promising delivery of almost anything, at least in bigger cities. One of Gilbert's frequent clients is Betty Carver (Mary Steenburgen), trapped in a loveless marriage to an insurance agent. Both Gilbert and Betty use these deliveries as an opportunity to escape the difficulties in their lives.

Frankly, Gilbert has a lot more difficulties in his life than Betty does. Gilbert's father walked out on the family many years ago and committed suicide, leaving the family in dire financial straits and stuck in a house that could probably collapse any day now. Gilbert's older brother fled town on graduating high school, while Momma (Darlene Cates) decided she wouldn't leave the house and ate herself into the sort of obesity that seriously shortens people's lives; no wonder the older brother couldn't face all this. But wait, there's more; Gilbert has a kid brother Arnie (Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie that made him a star) who is autistic or has some other sort of brain injury that's left him trapped at a fairly young age developmentally, much younger than the 18 he's about to turn. Of course, the doctors didn't even think young Arnie would reach 10. The only good news for Gilbert is that he's got two sisters who can help out around the house.

One of Arnie's joys, and one that's a relative positive for the people around him, is the annual parade of Airstream trailers that go through Endora every year on their way to an annual meet-up of fans of those old trailers. You've probably seen them before, the aluminum trailers with rounded corners towed by a pick-up truck or something with similar power. This year, one of the trucks breaks down on the road where Gilbert and Arnie are watching the procession, leaving two women stranded, young Becky (Juliette Lewis) and her grandmother.

Gilbert offers to do what he can to help in terms of driving Becky around to do errands like getting fresh groceries or picking up the neeed parts for the car, since she and Grandma can't do the driving. This gives Gilbert a chance to fall in love with Becky, but it also means he won't be watching Arnie quite so closely. Another of Arnie's joys is running off and hiding, and this is a joy that is a constant source of consternation for the rest of the Grapes, since Arnie likes to hide from everybody else by climbing the town's water tower, which isn't really hiding at all since it brings out a crowd and really embarrasses both Gilbert and Momma, albeit in different ways.

Major life events happen to more or less everybody, although for Becky they're not quite so major, involving finally getting to meet Gilbert's mother -- something Gilbert had always been reluctant to do -- and getting the part to repair the truck which of course means she'll be leaving town and leaving Gilbert behind.

What's Eating Gilbert Grape is one of those little movies, despite the presence of Johnny Depp, who was already a pretty big name after his starring role in Edward Scissorhands. That, combined with the subject matter of the movie, makes it fairly easy to understand why the movie was a box-office failure on its original release. That's a shame, since the movie is filled with fine performances, even when they're playing the sort of characters who can be difficult to sympathize with. (Despite Arnie's having a medical condition that's clearly not his fault, it's also obvious why people around him would have periods of intense frustration, reminiscent of Benny and Joon, also starring Depp and released a few months before What's Eating Gilbert Grape.)

If the movie has flaws, it's probably that the sort of small-town life seen here is stereotyped, with all of the supporting characters being practically archetypes of what you'd really meet in a small town. That, and the story wrapping up just a bit too neatly. But those are relatively minor flaws in what is otherwise a very good movie.