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 fall through the living room floor, and few people outside the immediate family have ever seen her recently.
Gilbert is a stockboy at Lamson's, the local grocery store which is being squeezed out of existence by the giant Food Land at the edge of town. Since high school, he has been carrying on a clandestine affair with Mrs. Betty Carver, the lonely wife of the town's insurance salesman; she chose him, she says, because "I knew you'd never leave Endora" (111)...