This time, he kept a core of his Scandinavian cohorts on hand, such as famed cinematographer Sven Nykvist (he has worked with Ingmar Bergman and Woody Allen), who gives the film the ingenuous look of recently faded family photographs. With first-time screenwriter Peter Hedges working from his own novel, What's Eating Gilbert Grape is the unpunctuated sum of many quirky parts, including some very odd townsfolk, such as a cheerful, crew-cut undertaker (Crispin Glover) and an amiable handyman (John C. Reilly) who believes, religiously, that the town's new Burger Barn is the "cutting edge" of opportunity. This emphasis on character and texture is full of pleasurable rewards–especially when the astonishing DiCaprio is on-screen–and there's enough growth and compassion to keep it from being a Diane Arbus freak show come to life. The film suffers from poor pacing toward the end, however, and there's not much chemistry between Lewis and Depp (who looks a bit sickly here) to spark things up. Still, their relationship does reflect the tale's unique (for Hollywood) sex-role chemistry.Hedges and Hallström spent weeks working on the script in Stockholm, ultimately boring it down to an outline, with the ending sort of left up in the air. (Hedges would continue to write and re-write the screenplay all through production.) In the meantime, casting continued, with special attention paid to the two physically-challenged characters, Momma and Arnie. Hedges was worried that Momma would be downsized for the movie, that a moderately plump name actress might be cast, so when he saw Darlene Cates on the Sally Jesse Raphael show being profiled as an overweight agoraphobe, he immediately brought her to Hallström’s attention. ![]() Cates weighed around 500 pounds and had not left her house in five years before flying to New York for the emotional televised interview. ![]() “When Lasse saw the tape of Darlene, he started to cry, because she had the heart and the spirit of what the mother should feel like,” says Hedges. “She was almost a little girl trapped in this body. There was a sweetness to her.”ĭarlene Cates returned to Forney, Texas, after Gilbert Grape, did a few TV episodes, and recently starred in a short film that’s awaiting release titled Mother.
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