What's Eating Gilbert Grape?
Have you read the book by Peter Hedges or seen the movie starring Johnny Depp and Leonardo Di Caprio?
Here's a reminder of the story:
"Grape is 24 and stuck in a rut. Trapped by feelings of responsibility to his eccentric family, he works bagging groceries in their small Iowa town. And what a family! At its core lies his beached whale of a mother; she never leaves her TV chair and clamors constantly for more food and cigarettes. There is Ellen, his maddeningly pubescent sister; 17-year-old retarded brother Arnie, whom Gilbert loves dearly; and his older sister Amy who devotes herself to keeping everyone happy. Gilbert is saved by a beautiful and strange girl who startles him into life. That such a creature would take an interest in an apparent loser like Gilbert requires the reader's willing suspension of disbelief; but with such appealingly funny writing, one is only too happy to oblige." Sheila Riley/Library Journal
Check out the Literature Resource Center to read what Richard Aleva says about the movie:
"...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..."
Have you felt stuck in your life? What do you think of Gilbert's relationship with his mother and his siblings?
1 comment:
I have seen this film, and it made me think of several other widely varying works that I latched onto when I was probably a lot younger than Gilbert but felt equally trapped: Paul Simon's "In my Little Town," and Jean-Paul Sartre's "No Exit." What's worth thinking about here, for me, with the perspective of age, is how easy it is for kids to get overwhelmed by circumstances and to see no way out for themselves. Think about how easily in another era this movie could've become "Badlands" or "Bonnie & Clyde," particularly with this landscape. It's a wistful, gentle book/movie that allows itself to be "pointless" enough not to go there. But it was awfully convenient of Gilbert's mother to die and the house to burn to just free him of all these burdens and set him on the road; it might have made the choice to leave more effective existentially if the impetus hadn't been so externally driven. Was that handled differently in the book, I wonder?
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