Movie Meme: Week 4 - What's Eating Gilbert Grape?

The topic of the week this time at Metal Mummy's Movie Meme is the Films of Leonardo DiCaprio. This is brilliant for me as he's one of my all time favourite actors. When asked what my favourite film of his would be I'm tempted to go with The Departed, as it's one of the best films I've seen in years. However, I'm going to take the prompt slightly differently and go with what I feel is one of his best performances.

Now we all know he can do brooding, bad boy, suave crim and all the rest of it, but what really alerted me to the fact that he wasn't just a pretty boy who got lucky on the strength of his looks and actually had it in him to become a great actor was his portrayal of the severely mentally handicapped Arnie. His performance was so convincing that had I not seen him in other films already I would have thought he actually was disabled. It is a performance that is completely without vanity - which is all the more impressive considering he was a teenager at the time.