Word: dicaprios
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...once-beautiful mother's way of mourning is to wallow in grotesque obesity, his older sister Amy (Laura Harrington) has taken over the maternal role. The Grape family is frozen in time. Momma's immobility reduces her to a permanent state of infancy, and mentally handicapped brother Arnie (Leonardo DiCaprio) needs constant supervision...
Gilbert (Johnny Depp) might be the patron saint of all such caretakers. A grocery-store clerk in forlorn Endora, Iowa, he looks after his retarded brother (Leonardo DiCaprio), who likes to climb things, and his mountainous mom (Darlene Cates), who, at an immobile 500 lbs., is something of a local tourist attraction. Nor does the need stop at his front door. Gilbert must satisfy the sexual desires of a tartly cheerful matron (Mary Steenburgen), even as he is drawn to newcomer Becky (Juliette Lewis), a teenager whose ease and freedom seem like fresh oxygen in the coal mine of Gilbert...
...heard this one before: except for Momma, it's The Last Picture Show. This picture show doesn't match that one. The script, by Peter Hedges from his novel, spins out a few too many eccentricities, and the direction, by Lasse Hallstrom (My Life as a Dog), meanders. But DiCaprio and Cates bring loopy authenticity to their roles, and Depp is, as always, a most effacing star. Here, as in Edward Scissorhands and Benny & Joon, he behaves wonderfully on screen. He should be even better when he gets the chance to misbehave as a demented director in Tim Burton...
...script by Robert Getchell, directed by Michael Caton-Jones, contains some elisions and some dramatic heightening, but nothing outrageous. It opens with a young Toby (nicely played by Leonardo DiCaprio) and his mother Caroline (Ellen Barkin) adrift in the West in the 1950s, looking for work. She's penniless, on the run from a broken marriage and an inappropriate lover. She has a good heart but not a very sensible one, and she falls in with Dwight Hansen (Robert De Niro), an auto mechanic from dreary Concrete, Washington...
...boyhood. What he means, he says, is that "I was watching a movie; I was caught up in it." The main street of Concrete, Washington, looks, after a lot of work by set builders, exactly as it did in the '50s. Tobias thinks the actors were marvelous, particularly Leonardo DiCaprio as Toby in a car-stealing scene, a dumb adolescent stunt that happened just the way it was filmed...