
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, March 5, 1994                   TAG: 9403080076
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: C-8   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: KATHERINE REED STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

ACTING SAVES `GILBERT GRAPE'

Gilbert Grape is a hard guy to get a handle on. He bags groceries at a dying, mom-and-pop grocery store, takes care of his mentally handicapped little brother, Arnie, and says that all he really wants for himself is to be a good person.

But Gilbert also is carrying on an affair with the desperately unhappy wife of an insurance salesman, and he simply cannot resist making fat jokes about his enormously obese mother. Even on first dates.

The title character of "What's Eating Gilbert Grape?" exists only in relation to the people around him, and that is both the point and the difficulty of this movie.

Somehow, miraculously, through a combination of good acting and an oddball story, "Gilbert Grape" just barely overcomes its weaknesses and manages not to collapse under the weight (pun intended) of its central "joke".

Directed by Lasse Hallstrom ("My Life as a Dog," "Once Around"), "Gilbert Grape" is set in the tiny Iowa town of Endora. Downtown looks a lot like Anarene, Texas, in "The Last Picture Show," but without the tumbleweeds. The rich farmland around tiny Endora, filmed by Sven Nykvist, is by turns a place of limitless beauty and the most profound desolation. It depends on who's looking.

Gilbert, played by Johnny Depp, is just kicking around town with Arnie, committing adultery and complaining about his fat mom, when Becky (played by Juliette Lewis of "Cape Fear"; she's the one who had to endure that big, sloppy kiss from Robert DeNiro) rolls into town in a caravan of trailer tourists. He barely notices Becky at first, so busy is he concentrating on his empty insides.

In fact, it is Arnie, brilliantly played by Leonard DiCaprio, who brings Gilbert to Becky's attention. Arnie has climbed the water tower again, and Becky is present for Gilbert's artful, sensitive effort to talk Arnie down from the tower.

Eventually, Gilbert must speak to Becky, because he has to deliver her and some groceries to her trailer. She and her grandmother, with whom she is traveling, are stuck in Endora waiting for a part for their pickup truck.

What follows is a fairly conventional man-falls-in-love-and-has-his-eyes-opened kind of plot. Becky plays amateur psychiatrist to Gilbert, who is feeling guilty for ignoring his duties to Arnie and to Mama.

Arnie's problem is his brain: He has managed to live eight years longer than the 10 he was given at birth. Mama's problem is that she weighs about 500 pounds and is agoraphobic since the suicide of her husband. The house is literally collapsing under her weight - and so is Gilbert.

But the film is heavy-handed on two points: that Gilbert is stuck in Endora and that Mama is fat. Depp and DiCaprio deserve a lot of the credit for keeping the film interesting, and the relationship of their characters - much like that of George and Lennie in "Of Mice and Men" - keeps "Gilbert" on the right track.

by CNB