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It all sounds really charming, on paper. But where I should have been engaged and absorbed with this unconventional family drama, I just found myself annoyed and frustrated. I like the concept - a young man whose love for family is constantly strained by the yoke of premature responsibility. Arnie is a bona fide pain in the ass who can never be left unsupervised, needs help with basic personal care, and on most days is a danger to himself and others. But it's not his fault, and he's fundamentally a sweet boy. Bonnie did not ask for what happened to her, either, but children who are asked to bear the burden of adulthood too soon often become resentful, sad people and Gilbert struggles with this daily. Part of him welcomes the task but the rest of him secretly wishes Arnie would drop dead or run away, so everyone can have their lives back.

But this complex dynamic is hard to illustrate without making Gilbert look callous, and the script, by Peter Hedges (Dan in Real Life, About a Boy), goes through too many hoops to soften this. Of course we don't want to hate Gilbert, we want to understand him - but there's so much sleight of hand devoted to obscuring his selfish desires that the story ties itself in knots. The presence of two disabled family members complicates the story. Children shouldn't have to take care of their parents while they're still children, and caring for the mentally ill can challenge anyone's capacity for love and understanding at any age. But trying to tackle both issues at once is too much for this movie to handle.

There are too many problems here - too many characters, too many subplots that go nowhere, and too many scenes that serve little obvious purpose. Gilbert’s sisters feel like they could have been combined into one character. Tucker seems to represent the dead-end stagnation that awaits all citizens of Endora, but he feels too much like the stock Best Friend character that exists in almost every family drama. Betty comes across like a simpering twit, and her pursuit of Gilbert feels like just another story obligation. Arnie's sole purpose here seems to be Walking Burden, and though DiCaprio's performance is terrific, the character himself isn't a person, he's a concept - and that's the problem with ALL of these people.

Juliette Lewis is fine as Becky - but she's not playing a person, she's playing a type of person, and it's the same one that she’s usually asked to play.She doesn’t seem real or appealing to me at all. This is not Depp's best work but he's also not asked to do much here other than evoke an anesthetic while the story lurches forward around him. Arnie's affliction is never explained beyond the fact that he could "go at any time," so while this depiction of mental handicap might seem accurate in some ways, he felt more like an archetype than an individual, and this cheapened the experience for me. It's not the actors, so much as it is a cluttered, murky script and standard issue, off the shelf characters.

So no, I didn't like What's Eating Gilbert Grape, and in fact I found it more than a little frustrating and at times even maddening. It's filled with compelling themes, decent performances and occasional moments of inspiration, but neither the story or the characters advance or grow in meaningful ways; it just goes through the motions, checks off the right boxes, and sits back with its hand out, waiting for an Oscar. I can be sensitive, but a story still has to earn my tears, and this one doesn't.

That's too bad, because inside What's Eating Gilbert Grape are the seeds (not a pun) of something wonderful.

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