What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993)

I recently watched this movie again after many years, and was surprised how many details I had forgotten. It features a great ensemble cast who seem to mostly share a screen rapport. Leonardo DiCaprio previews his future star career with a stellar performance as the difficult Arnie.

I thought the scene where husband Mr. Carver comes home from work and obsesses over the burnt cookies and the unused swimming pool was silly and a bad fit for the film, especially consider what came after the scene. Meanwhile the two sisters were great characters: they were emotional when the situation called for it, but gave an even and restrained performance. I would have like to have seen more of them....

**A rather conventional and average family drama, where DiCaprio and Depp's performances turn out to be the only truly worthy note.**

Sometimes, what makes a film remarkable is the extraordinary performance of an actor, and that becomes even more admirable when that actor is extremely young. That's what we have in this film, a conventional family drama, where a young adult tries to live his life as normally as possible while having to take care of everyone around him, particularly his mother, who is morbidly obese and depressed, and his younger brother, who has a mental problem that the movie never really specifies.

In fact, I didn't find the script particularly interesting. Cinema is full of family dramas, and this one has nothing really new or fresh to add. And if the script doesn'...

So, I had no idea who Leonardo was when I saw this back in the 90s, it was before Titanic, before he made it big, and I thought they hired an intellectually disabled man to play the part.

And it dropped in '93 so that would make Dicaprio about 19? Maybe 18 when they made it?

I doubt they would give an Oscar to a kid that young, but see that he's CLEARLY not Intellectually Disabled and how believable he was, well, that's probably one of the best performances I've seen. That was Oscar worthy.

Besides that, it was really a Johnny Depp vehicle... as much as a 90s indy film can be, and he played a calm, low key, and utterly charming role in a film about a man that had to maybe grow up too fast and deal with too much at too young an age.

And, of course, a charming little love story. ...

With his mother (Darlene Cates) morbidly obese and equally embarrassed about her image, and his younger brother "Arnie" (Leonardo DiCaprio) dealing with mental health issues, it falls to "Gilbert" (Johnny Depp) to try and provide as best he can for his family. He has a job in the struggling local grocery store that sees him deliver to the "Carver" family. "Betty" (Mary Steenburgen) is the bored housewife there with whom "Gilbert" has some fun whilst her husband is off selling insurance. It's all a relentless cycle that's going nowhere until "Becky" (Juliette Lewis) comes to town and starts to give "Gilbert" a sense of a different purpose. She begins to help him see that he must live a bit of his own life too. When a fairly predictable tragedy ensues, everyone has to make some choices - and...