What's Eating Gilbert Grape: Novel into Film

This paper examines the translation of a novel into a film, through the comparison between Peter Hedges' novel, What's Eating Gilbert Grape, and the film directed by Lasse Hallstrom from Hedges' screenplay. While the film is faithful to many of the principal characters and incidents in the book, it differs in several minor respects. More importantly, it makes only a brief, introductory attempt to retain the book's first-person narrative structure, thereby dramatically altering essential elements in the story and its central theme. This paper looks at the ways in which these two contrasting media are used to tell the story of small-town longing, frustration, and hope.

Gilbert Grape is still living at home in a highly dysfunctional family. His older, Larry, has managed to get away from the Iowa town on Endora which has trapped all the other Grapes (in the novel, another older sister, Janice, has also escaped, but Hedges eliminates her in the screenplay in order to streamline the story). Gilbert lives with his big sister, Amy, his younger sister, Ellen, and their retarded brother, Arnie, who will shortly celebrate his eighteenth birthday.

Amy acts as surrogate mother to the family, despite the fact that Bonnie Grape is still very much alive. However, since the suicide of her husband, Bonnie has retreated to the living room couch, where she is attempting her own kind of suicide by eating everything in sight. She has reached the point where Gilbert is afraid she will fa

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c situation. After that, although the story remains primarily focused on Gilbert, the narrative sometimes shifts away from him. The most significant shift, which rewrites a scene from the book, occurs late in the film when Arnie discovers Bonnie apparently asleep on her bed upstairs and tries to wake her. As it slowly occurs to him that she is not asleep but has in fact died there, he begins to wail and eventually runs outside, where Amy follows him and tries to calm him. Although the scene is poignant and well filmed, it could not have occurred in a book told entirely from the perspective of a character who is not present. It shifts the focus subtly away from Gilbert and makes the story slightly less about him, even though these characters are important to him and central to his story. First-person narrative is an interesting novelistic device, one that can be used equally effectively on film. However, it is more difficult to maintain on the screen, since it requires the filmmaker to adhere exclusively to events and a point of view available only to the principal character. On paper, this is easier, since everything is written using "I" and "me," although it does demand that the writer reveal character using as much refle

Category: Film - W