Word: gilberte
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...just as willful and complex playing Arnie, the retarded boy living under a death sentence in What's Eating Gilbert Grape; as he is playing Meryl Streep's pyromaniac son Hank in Marvin's Room. Other young actors, to keep viewers on their side, would strike the sympathy key fortissimo. But DiCaprio, knowing that he had a cuddly-toy quality (a face just shy of puberty, a smile that, in his first TV spot, was used to sell milk), barely rouged the rougher aspects of his characters. Toby is a decent kid, but his stabs at '50s punkdom rasp...
Waiting for his friend Ethan to come by, DiCaprio flips through the channels and passes a VH1 special on the Bee Gees, which causes him to belt out a falsetto version of Staying Alive, followed by, for some reason, Funky Town. Then he flicks by What's Eating Gilbert Grape, the movie for which he was nominated for an Academy Award. "That was the funnest character to play ever, dude. It was so fun, I was playing it off-camera a lot too. Every scene I just did whatever the hell I wanted. They didn't have much...
John C. Reilly is one of Hollywood's best-kept secrets. Or, at least, he used to be. Tending to thrive in atmospheric ensemble pieces like Ulu Grosbard's Georgia and Lasse Hallstrom's What's Eating Gilbert Grape?, the actor's star has risen considerably by way of his self-effacing and understated performances in director Paul Thomas Anderson's first two features, Hard Eight and Boogie Nights. His acceptance into Hollywood pictures is a recent development, having begun with last year's baseball romance For Love of the Game continuing with Wolfgang Peterson's upcoming tragedy...
Their solution to this problem--based on Gilbert's chance encounter with Japanese culture at a London exhibition--turns out to be The Mikado. And Mike Leigh's movie about mounting that best of all G. & S. works turns out to be one of the year's more beguiling surprises. It is not at all the sort of thing one expects from Leigh, the very sober creator of films like Naked and Secrets and Lies, for it is basically the story--somewhat comic, somewhat desperate, very carefully detailed--of rehearsing and putting on the operetta...
What gives Topsy-Turvy its heartfelt heft is the way in which it shows how this process takes over everyone's life--eventually driving out all distractions, whether they be Gordon's defeat at Khartoum, the sterilities of Gilbert's marriage or the many anxious neuroses of the acting company. It is show biz as therapy, with all tensions temporarily resolved when the show is a hit. But there is also a sense of real, very Mike Leighish, life in this film that darkens and transforms it. And transfixes...