Warning: potential spoilers ahead.
Leonardo Dicaprio is masterful as the autistic 18 year-old Arnie Grape. I never would have thought, after seeing the crap he's doing now. Wow. His acting here, though not quite in the league of Daniel Day-Lewis' Cristy Brown in My Left Foot, rivals that of Geoffrey Rush in Shine and Dustin Hoffman in Rain man. I do not hesitate to say this. Rush and Hoffman are huge actors, and Dicaprio was just a boy at the time, but his performance is just as moving, just as comfortable, and just as mind-blowing, real and believable. Wow. He can act. It's a shame he's so terrible now. Maybe he just needs a suitable role. He's just no good at the squinting tough-guy stuff. He's no Clint Eastwood (which could be a compliment, I'm not sure).
Anyway, the rest of the movie doesn't quite measure up to Dicaprio's tremendous acting, which doesn't make it necessarily bad. I don't want to seem shallow or closed, but I'm not into the cliché romance stuff. Yawn. I've heard it all before. Juliette Lewis is just boring, but her character is boring, being the perfect girl savior. She's not noticeably bad, though. Johnny Depp isn't bad either. He's not outstanding, but he's believable. Gilbert Grape is a complex character, that doesn't come around too often. He's conflicted, with himself, his mother, his autistic brother, his secret lover's husband, and the people that mistreat Arnie. He's a good kid. And he is human (unlike Juliette Lewis' character, faw!). He loses it. He runs away when things get hard. But he can come back. At one point, he hits Arnie, trying to get him to take a bath (like Dustin Hoffman in Rain man, Arnie is afraid of water). And he runs away, ashamed. But he comes back to Arnie's party, and they make amends.
Gilbert's mother is overweight. Which is an understatement. He's embarrassed of her, and frequently refers to her as a beached whale. Really a rude analogy coming from her own son. She never moves from the couch. Never goes anywhere. But she loves her children, and when the police take Arnie away (after he climbs the tower for the last time), she gets up, and fights to get him back. Sniff, sniff. Touching. Anyway, she dies later during the party, and Arnie goes up to visit. This is a beautiful scene. A horrible scene. A beautiful scene. "Haha, you're hiding, momma," Arnie says. He thinks it's a game, but when it lasts for too long, he's scared. He's shaking her. He's crying. He's yelling for her to stop hiding. He's crying. What do you know...I'm crying too.
Anyway, I don't want to bore myself (or you) by going on and on about the plot. Lalala. I didn't like the cliché romantic part of this film, but the rest is quite good. Good acting overall, not a bad story actually, though slightly predictable, the relationship between Gilbert and Arnie is thorough, moving and developed, and well, Leonardo Dicaprio is outstanding. And to think, stone-boy Tommy Lee Jones won best supporting actor over him. Faw, what balonee. Dicaprio delivers simply one of the best performances I have ever seen.
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