Blessed Are the Caretakers

By RICHARD CORLISS

In movies, misfits are sacred. The emotionally or mentally disturbed are usually portrayed not as human beings working harder than most to get through the day, but as heroes and holy fools. In many a film fable they are sentimentalized into superior beings -- residents of some spiritual high-rise that the rest of us might aspire to, if only we dared jettison our inhibitions and soar into the divine state we ignorantly call dysfunction or some unkinder name.

So half a cheer for What's Eating Gilbert Grape, which suggests that the true heroes are those people who day by day must tend to misfits, and do so with love, tenacity and a determination not to go terminally sour in the process.

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's life.

You've 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's forthcoming Ed Wood.