In American movies, small towns symbolize many different things: remembrance, family, community, entrapment, the problems of youth and age, everything we loved, lost or left behind. For better or worse, they're prime Heartland icons.
And the fictional small town in What's Eating Gilbert Grape" - Endora, Iowa (Pop. 1,091) - is a model of its type: part comic tall tale, part idealization, a mix of naturalism, optimism and nightmare. It's a place we see dreamily, through sunlight and reveries that dim or shimmer as we watch.As refashioned by writer Peter Hedges from his 1991 novel, "Gilbert Grape's" Endora is a classic American movie small town for the post-1960s era. It's not a place of Andy Hardy amity or Norman Rockwell wit and warmth. It's the place you want to get away from.
Yet, as stunningly visualized by two brillian Swedish filmmakers - director Lasse Hallstrom ("My Life as a Dog") and cinematographer Sven Nykvist (Ingmar Bergman's collaborator), Endora is beautiful, too: a bucolic realm of wide vistas, farms hanging low on the horizon, swimming holes, highways stretched out over rolling hills.
It's a beauty largely ignored by the people who live there. The story's most symbolic character, Gilbert's 500-pound mama, Bonnie Grape (Darlene Cates), sits before a TV stuffing herself night and day while her children wait on her slavishly. That double chow-down, consuming food and television, is what's trapping her, killing her. Her condition is the most extreme example of what's happening to everybody - in a town of dreamers who don't even yearn for the sophistication of Paris or New York, who'd settle for Des Moines or St. Louis. Or even Dubuque.
It's a long way from the paradisical rural visions that used to dominate American movies in the 1910s and 1920s - when D.W. Griffith made the shatteringly lyrical "True Heart Susie" (1919) and "Way Down East" (1920), both with Lillian Gish, when Henry King made the earthy revenge saga "Tol'able David" (1921) and F.W. Murnau, a German emigre who knew little of rural America, made "Sunrise" (1927), a romantic/poetic fable about pure country and evil city, that is perhaps the loveliest of all American silent films.
It's even a long way from the movie that has become our quintessential American small-town film: city boy Frank Capra's 1946 "It's a Wonderful Life," set in Bedford Falls, N.Y., as viewed by the Eye of Heaven.
This great archetypal movie with its portrait of a good, but savagely disillusioned and discontented building and loan operator, George Bailey, on the brink of suicide at Christmas - crystallizes the American small-town movie myth. George, played by Jimmy Stewart (in real life, a small-town guy from improbably named Indiana, Penn.) is rescued from the abyss of madness and death by his friends and his angels: Bedford Falls' steadfast community, and whimsical Clarence. The film stands precisely at midpoint, pointing back to the lyrical dream that preceded it, forward to the nightmares that lay ahead.
People keep watching it because, on some level, they must feel this is the way small towns (and America itself) ought to be. This is the way we dream them, remember them.
Or the way we used to. But not anymore.
I have a sort of proprietary interest in small-town movies because I grew up in one myself (a small town, that is - not a movie). Mine wasn't much bigger, actually, than Endora. It was Williams Bay, Wis., pop. about 1,114 or so, during the years (1953-1964) when I went from third to 12th grades, graduating in a class of 28. (These days, according to the atlas, the population is a lustier 2,108.)
It was a better-advantaged small town than most. It had the requisite farms and tiny main street. It also had spring-fed Geneva Lake, a summertime resort area, and the Belfry Theater, a Mormon church turned community playhouse where I worked in summers - and where Paul Newman and Harrison Ford had once been resident actors. It had beaches, elm-lined streets, oak forests that swept down to the lake paths - and outdoor courts and school gyms where my friends and I found time to play several thousand games of basketball.
That's what you do in small towns. Go to school, play basketball or go to the games, go to church, socialize, get ready to leave town or get a family. Read, maybe. Go to movies (though Williams Bay didn't have a movie theater).
Nowadays, the town is more geographically isolated. There are no buses or trains going in. but like most American cities or towns, it's part of a vast electronic media web, linked by TV, supermarket tabloids, top 40 radio, served by the same chain stores and fed by the same chain restaurants. That network, coast to bombarded coast, has homogenized many of the old disparate cultures, blurred the old regionalism.
Once upon a time, movie small towns were mostly created on the same Hollywood soundstage streets. Now, they're shot all over the country, on location - though, in a way, they're all part of the same place. Anywhere, U.S.A.
That wasn't the place I lived in. Or even the one I saw in the movies.
In the '30s and '40s, in fact, the small-town movie paradigm was the Andy Hardy series, so popular they kept MGM afloat.
"Gilbert Grape's" Endora is a mishmash of a town. Supposedly set in Iowa, it was shot in Texas, with a cast that hails from Texas, Arkansas, Michigan, New York, Los Angeles - and Chicago. Yet the wild mix of accents (the Southern drawls of Mary Steenburgen and Darlene Cates, the L.A. languor of Juliette Lewis and Crispin Glover, Johnny Depp's Kentucky-Florida-L.A. crossbred hipster murmur and the Midwestern twang of Laura Harrington and Mary Kate Schellhardt as the Grape girls) never really bothers us. It fits. Anywhere, U.S.A.
What gives "Gilbert Grape" its strength, though - the high quality it shares with other excellent recent small-town movies.