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Romance, Drama 118 min PG-13
Rotten Tomatoes90%Metacritic73IMDb
Life is a terrible thing to sleep through.
Gilbert Grape is a small-town young man with a lot of responsibility. Chief among his concerns are his mother, who is so overweight that she can't leave the house, and his mentally impaired younger brother, Arnie, who has a knack for finding trouble. Settled into a job at a grocery store and an ongoing affair with local woman Betty Carver, Gilbert finally has his life shaken up by the free-spirited Becky.
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Character-led, contemplative, spare and intimate.
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Written by TMDB members; each links to the original. Not part of Taste Buds's numbers.
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 they're not easy. DiCaprio is pretty outstanding as the soon-to-be eighteen year old lad whose behaviour would test the patience of a saint. His loud and repetitive language and his child-like tantrums are just the tip of the iceberg and his performance - especially his grinning - gives "Arnie" an engaging amount of character. He's not going for the sympathy vote, either - his portrayal elicits f
Read the whole review on TMDBSo, 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. A charming story about family. About loyalty. There is honestly absolutely nothing to criticize here, except, it's certainly a 90s story, a 90s movie, and if you are removed from Gen-X, it might not have the appeal. This isn't the over-the-top FX sort of films that are a hallmark of the Millennial generation... ...but beyond that, KUDOS to Leo for nailing it as such a young age, and a cheers to everyone else
Read the whole review on TMDB**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't seem remarkable to me, the production values and technical aspects deserve even less attention, with the film betting on very conventional and average visuals, and a pace that sometimes slows down and falters, the result of an editing not always well executed. What makes the film more interesting is the cast, which includes two young actors, then very promising, called Johnny Depp and Leonardo DiCap
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77 profiled raters. Loved most by The Prestige Hunters; disliked most by The Thrill Chasers.
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