What’s eating Gilbert Grape is a movie about a guy in high school who has a troubled home life. The title is a nod to this.
His priorities are out of alignment. And the thing that is “eating him” is just that.
Anyway, Gilbert’s mom is overweight. She is technically morbidly obese. But the implication is that when her husband died, she started eating herself to death.
Gilbert doesn’t seem to understand certain things about boundaries. Neither does Arnie, his little brother. Arnie has autism. He’s played by Leonardo Dicaprio, and he is a good kid. He does some outlandish things throughout the movie. He has a tendency to climb things.
The authorities get called on Arnie a couple times. Gilbert does his best to rein his brother in. He doesn’t tend to overstep or be too hard on him, but at a certain point, he becomes kind of negligent. They are both in high school. And in the end, Arnie’s limits start to show. And the sisters start to get upset with Gilbert.
The point is driven home again and again that Gilbert has mixed up priorities. This is made clear by a nebulous relationship with Mary Steenburgen’s character. She is an older woman, and she is married.
The problems with boundaries become more evident as the movie progresses. Both sons seem to struggle here, but Arnie’s limits are just more obvious. Women like Gilbert, but he makes some mistakes.
Sometimes, there is an elephant in the room, figuratively speaking. That is a theme that this movie explores in depth. Arnie is, in some ways, the most obvious sign of this family’s problems. It is hard to not notice Arnie. But Gilbert is a little smoother about it all, but that ends up landing him in situations that are even more dangerous.
Arnie is a handful, but he is not the root of his family’s problems. What I mean to say is that Gilbert is probably a lot like his father. But when his dad checked out, he was left without a role model. So, he does his best. But like I said, Arnie is kind of out there. The thing is, Gilbert is so smooth about all this that I don’t think anyone noticed his dad isn’t around.
That is maybe why he is unsure sometimes.
Eventually, he meets a girl. She is roughly his age. She does her best to explain to him what is going on with his mom and his sisters — and the older lady he is involved with.
Basically, the sins of the father are visited upon the son. Gilbert starts to check out mentally, and then Arnie starts to suffer in turn.
Eventually, the sisters make it clear to Gilbert that he needs to make it right with Arnie.
There is a touching scene where Gilbert hugs Arnie after he jumps down from a tree. “Don’t scare Gilbert,” is what he says to him.
This was the breakthrough moment for the entire family. Gilbert needed to be a better man than his father.
The elephant in the room is an idiom. Basically, that is the theme explored in this film. There are many ways you could take that phrase, especially as it applies to three characters in particular — and maybe just one.
The dad is the elephant in the room.
The impact of his death was felt by the entire family. But three characters specifically are impacted in very obvious ways. Three lives. The father was a selfish, egotistical person. He hurt his family. He made a very poor decision. But the poor decision he made was not killing himself. The poor decision he made was having a kid before he was ready. The mom redeems herself at the end by showing that the character was always there. She climbs the stairs back to her room on the upper floor of the house. And she dies and is found by Arnie next morning.
The film ends with the family house going up in flames. This is to say, symbolically, that sometimes people don’t get to know. The two sisters, Gilbert, and Arnie decide amongst the four of them that this is one of those times.
And in the end, everybody ends up right where they need to be.