What's Eating Gilbert Grape?

I nearly bypassed What's Eating Gilbert Grape? because I had read somewhere a plot summary that made me cringe. Something about a boy trapped in Nowheresville, Iowa, by the demands of his monstrously fat mother and his retarded brother. It sounded like an undergraduate exercise in masochism and "honesty." Even the facts that the director was Lasse Hallstrom (who made my favorite movie about childhood, My Life as a Dog) and that Leonardo Di Caprio had been nominated for an Oscar for his work as the backward sibling didn't propel me to the box office, because foreign directors often lose their bearings in America and actors are practically assured nominations whenever they play the handicapped. And then there was that horrible, jokey title....But I went anyhow.

The movie turns out to be pretty splendid. It goes off the rails in its last fifteen minutes when scriptwriter Peter Hedges (adapting his own novel) uses a macabre and opportunistic plot twist to give his story a happy ending. And, in the lead, Johnny Depp, though a diligent actor, lacks the innate magnetism necessary to keep a passive character interesting. But everything else in the movie is compelling. And watching it reminded me of something I never should have forgotten. No movie (other than the crudest melodramas and farces) is about its events. It is about what its creators see in those events.

Yes, in Gilbert Grape, we do have that flat landscape and that dreary town and those dead-end jobs and a seemingly nonexistent future for our hero. But you also become aware that desolation and ugliness are just part of the fabric of Gilbert's life, and the movie is really about that entire fabric, with its elements of pity, comedy, lyricism, and nascent sexuality, as well as its boredom and squalor. Gilbert certainly does feel trapped by his "beached whale" of a mother (his description), his boring job in a grocery store, and his obligation to bathe his backward but all-too-energetic brother Arnie every night and to fetch him down from the water tower that he periodically climbs. But, sometimes through Gilbert's eyes and sometimes over his shoulder, we're looking at the flow of life in a particular place at a particular time. And, as life flows, it refuses to be labeled as "boring" or "wasteful" or even "charming." Life flows and sweeps away these categories.

Consider a dinner table scene early in the film. It begins as a mildly nasty family squabble. When Gilbert reprimands his sister for her lack of table manners, she sarcastically calls him "dad." With more than a touch of self-righteousness Gilbert sternly reminds her that "Dad is dead." (A suicide years ago.) The nastiness turns into pitiable embarrassment when Arnie fixates on his brother's statement and turns it into a silly chant. The mother angrily demands silence and stamps her foot to get it. But she weighs 350 pounds and the floor is poorly constructed. A grotesque comedy has evolved: will the table and all the diners disappear into the cellar? Cut to a few hours later: Gilbert and a handyman friend are in that cellar checking on the construction, and the pal, a walking encyclopedia of home improvement, is expatiating on the carpentry he will do with a pedantic fervor that becomes hilarious. A perfectly drab initial incident - a family tiff - has led to a roller-coaster ride of emotion.

The rest of the movie is like that. A potentially dangerous confrontation between a betrayed husband and his wife's lover turns into a business meeting and then the meeting is disrupted by a comic household catastrophe. The journey of the mother into town to retrieve Arnie from a police station threatens to be embarrassing and is embarrassing but also a bit harrowing, even heroic. Very few scenes in this film end up the way you thought they would. Life flows, things change.

Is this unpredictability a contradiction, even a refutation of the way Gilbert feels about the trap that is his life? Certainly, but isn't it the duty of the storytelling artist always to see more than his characters see, to feel more than they feel? Yes, Gilbert is going nowhere, but Hallstrom's camera can't stop showing us that the life around Gilbert is going helter-skelter in all directions.

Oh, about that Oscar-nominated performance by DiCaprio. It is infectious, beautifully detailed, and fully deserving of every award in sight. DiCaprio doesn't make Arnie pitiable at all but a human being zestfully engaged, on his peculiar terms, with the world. Watch for DiCaprio's little wince of concentration whenever he has to pick up something. And the girlish ecstatic swing of the elbows whenever Arnie runs. This is a performance that finds poetry where others might see only misery. Come to think of it, the whole movie does that.

If What's Eating Gilbert Grape? defies easy categorization because it is so mercurial, Angie challenges pigeonholing because its makers apparently didn't know what kind of movie they wanted to make. This film, about a Bensonhurst Italian-American working girl (Geena Davis) trying to discover what her true nature is, doesn't know what its own true nature is. Todd Graff writes the early scenes of Angie's fractious family life and her unplanned pregnancy by an unloved boyfriend with a coarseness trying to pass as naturalism. If we discover Angie in bed with her lover, she must be shown popping pimples on his back. His discovery that she's pregnant occurs when she has morning sickness all over his floor. (The vomit and their awareness of it magically disappear because the scene has to go in another direction. So much for naturalism.) If Angie's butcher father learns of his daughter's engagement and embraces her, then his hands must be soaked in blood which he promptly smears all over her white blouse. But Graff also wants a pinch of absurdism for his dramatic stew, so Angie's gynecologist turns out to be a dwarf. And wait, that's not enough. His nurse is even taller than Geena Davis!

When Angie takes up with a successful lawyer, the script suddenly tries to emulate screwball comedy, but Graff doesn't know how to write it. His idea of wit is to let the lawyer shout at a Museum of Modern Art guard (ejecting him and Angie for eating in the museum), "Your museum is overrated and the guards at the Whitney can kick your ass." Later, when this lover proves faithless and Angie's baby is born with congenital defects, the movie becomes the sort of women's weepie that Joan Crawford made in the 1940s. Finally, all ends happily. Angie reconciles with her family, reaches detente with her first beau (though doesn't necessarily marry him - that would be politically retro), and snaps her sick baby out of a coma by plucking the feeding tube from his mouth and giving him the corniest adult-to-baby pep talk since Clark Gable rallied his newborn son off the operating table in Adventure. At the end, Angie is blissfully breast-feeding and we are treated to a series of close-ups of all the other babies in the pediatric unit smiling blissfully at the camera. Goo Goo. Coo Coo. Now at last the movie knows exactly what it is: a Gerbers baby food commercial.

This movie would be beneath comment if it weren't for the acting. Not just better than the script, it's stratospheres above it. It's acting as writing: the skillfully placed pauses and incisive inflections tell us more than the language and storytelling do. As Angie's father and stepmother, Philip Bosco and Jenny O'Hara endow their characters with a dignity that Graff's writing would deny them. James Gondolfini, as the proletarian lover, is achingly affecting. Stephen Rea, as the "suit" who seduces and betrays, gives a subtle, duplex performance. On the one hand, we see how his charm wins Angie, but there's also just enough affectlessness in his seeming tolerance of her pregnancy that we know trouble is in store.

As Angie, Geena Davis has the toughest role simply because she's in every scene and therefore must plaster over with her acting all the fissures in Graff's script. She almost succeeds. Davis is emotionally ambidextrous. Bawdiness, need, sexuality, compassion, ruthlessness - Davis is never at a loss.

Martha Coolidge, the director, has to take some of the credit for the quality of the acting, and she also stages some scenes with skill, though none of her work here has the security of her direction of Rambling Rose, her lovely tragicomedy of a few years back. There's something faintly disgraceful about Coolidge being associated with this project. Early in her career, she made a lacerating documentary-expose of the pornography industry called Not a Pretty Picture. But what she condemned in that film was pornography for the gonads. In its final, weepy stages, Angie turns out to be pornography for the tear ducts.