What's Eating Gilbert Grape Review

Endora, Iowa is two streets and a grain silo, and Sven Nykvist photographs it as flat gold light falling on nothing much at all. That patience is the method. Lasse Hallstrom lets scenes run well past their information, which is why Darlene Cates works as Bonnie. She is never staged as a spectacle, so by the time the sheriff's deputies arrive to gawk at her the film has already taught you to look at her the way her children do. DiCaprio builds Arnie from watching rather than from tics, a boy whose attention runs half a second behind the room, and the water tower sequence draws its comedy and its dread from the same place.

Johnny Depp takes the thankless job of playing the person things happen to and underplays it almost to vanishing. The weak strand is Juliette Lewis. Becky turns up with a broken trailer and a bag of aphorisms about clouds and hearts, exists to give Gilbert permission to want a life, and leaves no evidence of an interior. The burning of the house is the one late image with real weight, which makes the closing voiceover about going anywhere sound like an apology for it.