What's Eating Gilbert Grape (1993)

The picture arrives from 1993, a decade before the current vocabulary was issued to critics. It concerns a grocery clerk in the fictional Iowa town of Endora who tends to a brother with a mental disability and a mother whose body has become the local spectacle. We are asked to sit with these people for two hours. No lessons are distributed, and nobody hands out a pamphlet at the door.

The casting remains the most curious artifact here. Darlene Cates, a woman of genuine size, was discovered through a television appearance and handed a role that had been written for someone like her, which was not common practice at the time. The film grants Bonnie dignity, shows us the stares in the street and the shame she carries, and finally gives her a death the family converts into a pyre. This is a sympathetic portrait of a fat character, offered long before such portraits became a matter of policy. Arnie, by contrast, is played by an able-bodied Leonardo DiCaprio, a decision that would now generate a season of complaint, though the character himself is drawn with specificity and love. The caregiving burden sits at the center of the story and is never played for a laugh.

Elsewhere the ledger runs thin. The sisters carry the housework, Becky drifts into town on a broken-down Travelall, and nobody indicts the patriarchy. Endora is white and the film does not notice. The lone systemic grievance is a new FoodLand supermarket squeezing out Lamson's Grocery, a mild grumble about big business that stays in the background where it belongs. There is no climate sermon, no rewriting of history, no lecturing from the pulpit. The film prefers to observe. Tender, unhurried, and almost entirely free of instruction, it endures as drama and fails as a syllabus.