Arnie Grape and I
What’s Eating Gilbert Grape is one of my favorite films.
Of all time!
The cast is beyond perfect.
Led by Johnny Depp, Juliette Lewis and Leonardo Di Caprio, the love story that is Gilbert Grape puts its director, Lasse Halstrom, at the very top of my heroic list. A personal pantheon that only includes one other director: Elia Kazan.
Yes, for me Halstrom’s What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? is almost the equal of On The Waterfront.
Almost.
Why?
The two scripts, the directors and, above all, the actors convey, with piercing depth, the courage it takes to love unconditionally.
In Gilbert Grapes’ case, it is the hero’s ultimately unconditional love for his family and his brother Arnie’s love for life itself.
Because my experience of family was the antithesis of Gilbert Grape’s, I don’t sympathize with the Depp character as I have increasingly identified with Marlon’s Brando’s Terry Malloy. In On The Waterfront we ultimately see the hero’s unconditional love of not family or tribe but of truth. Despite the union thugs and their increasingly dangerous threats, Terry Malloy must risk his life to tell the truth.
In both cases, however, the common denominator is love and … well … nothing beats a love story, particularly if it conveys a larger and more important truth than romance. As Humphrey Bogart’s Rick reminds us at the end of the world’s all-time favorite film, Casablanca, “the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy mixed-up world.”
Gilbert Grape’s brother, Arnie, is the elixir of life without one ounce of packaging. Few love life with greater abandon than Arnie Grape. The lesson from Arnie seems to be that life itself is love itself. Really nothing more nor less.
A message which is that large is not the entertaining fair of a romantic drama or romantic comedy.
It is a vitally important reminder to all of us.
In the end we must love something larger than ourselves or we’re more pathetic than any so-called “challenged” human being on earth.
What does Arnie love that is larger than himself?
Life itself!
He risks his own life on the top of the small town’s water tower in order to increase the thrill of being alive.
More importantly, however, Arnie cannot breath without being excited over the fact of simply being alive.
Arnie’s gratitude to life itself is his own form of prayer. In that sense, his character makes the film of Gilbert Grape a sacred offering. A vitally important gift for those of us who’ve forgotten how precious and miraculous life actually is.
When, however, Terry Malloy in On The Waterfront risks life itself for the love of the truth itself, then we glimpse the greatest mystery of the human heart: love beyond death.
Whether it’s truth or life itself we love, if life is love itself, then everything makes sense.
Hate, like death, becomes nothing more than a challenger, an opponent there to test the depths of our love. To let us know how much and how deeply we really do love.
There’s a lot of hate to deal with these days. I’m as guilty of hate as anyone.
Yes, I hate the whole idea of the Progressive New World Order. I think it’s a Communist lie foisted on the Free World with manipulative adjectives to keep an overly powerful and corrupt “Progressive” Establishment in charge of everything.
I hate the Jihadist fanatics who are clearly the “useful idiots” of Progressive architects who have learned to keep the Free World obsessed. To keep humanity concentrated on anything but its greatest enemy which is the tyrannical expansion of a Progressively Communist New World Order.
I’ve grown to hate men like Bill Maher who call us “stupid” while his comedian’s charm is selling a lie called Marxism, claiming that such a system is not only more reasonable than anything the Tea Party could offer but more inevitable.
One, undeniable truth is: the emotion most akin to love is hate.
One thing all of us do know in the heat of battle: we’re most alive when engulfed in the love/hate war. When we are pulsating with our selfless obsession over truth.
I enjoy leaping into this battle, sharing Arnie’s lust for life and my own growing certainty that the truth lies in the pro-life passions of the Sarah Palin family.
The truth cannot possibly sit in the lies and hypocrisies of the Clinton/Bush/Obama 22 year ownership of the White House and its Progressive dreams of a New World Order.
Their vaunted Third Way ultimately puts them and their friends on the top and keeps the American ideal of individual freedom and individual responsibility on the bottom. The New World Order renders America’s “inalienable right to life” irrelevant and Man’s entire right to life a myth.
So with Arnie’s ecstasy and my 70 year-old, Grumpy Grampy’s certainty, I declare that the elixir of life is Man’s loving and bliss-filled pursuit of The Truth!
If it’s anything less and you’re devoid of Arnie Grape’s love of life, I feel worse than sorry for you.
I can’t possibly feel anything for you at all.
If you don’t believe in the miracle and mystery of life, check this out.