The Weather Man
Directed by: Gore Verbinsky
Starring: Nicholas Cage, Hope Davis, Gemmenne de la Pena, Nicholas Hoult, Michael Caine
Rated: R for strong language and sexual content.
Parental Notes: This is a fairly standard R film in terms of sexual content, and it has plenty of foul language. More importantly, it’s not the sort of film likely to appeal to youngsters; it’s a melancholy and thoughtful character study.
Nicholas Cage has a knack for both dark comedy and for playing utterly hapless, pathetic men. Those two talents intersect in “The Weather Man,” a character study with a strong thread of dark comedy about a man whose life is disintegrating. Unlike Cage’s last film, “Lord of War,” here he plays a guy who is basically decent but somehow has gone off track. David Spritz is deeply flawed but almost impossible not to sympathize with, largely because of Cage’s performance.
David is a weather man on the local television news station, and is highly paid for a job which even he admits consists mostly of gesturing at a green screen and reading the prompter. He doesn’t even come up with the weather forecasts, he just reads them. His marriage to Noreen (Hope Davis) has dissolved and his two kids, overweight and depressed nine-year-old Shelly (Gemmenne de la Pena) and fresh-out-of-rehab teenager Mike (Nicholas Hoult), aren’t doing very well. Worse, his prize winning novelist father, Robert (Michael Caine), is disappointed in him.
If all that sounds depressing, it is. It’s meant to be. David has largely given up. He hopes in a general way that he can get his life back together, but he accepts most of his problems the way he does the food people throw at him on the street. He identifies it (an apple pie from McDonald’s, a Big Gulp, a taco) and tries to shrug it off. David’s life is heading for a crisis, but it’s not the kind of simple good-versus-evil crisis you’ll find in an action movie. It’s a general upheaval in every area of his life. His job and his relationships with his children, his ex-wife, and his father all come to crises of their own and he tries to find a way to cope. How he deals with everything shows us just the kind of guy he is: well-meaning but flawed.
Cage’s performance is perfect: he’s despairing and nearly hopeless, but trying to keep up appearances. In the moments when he lashes out or tries to actually connect with the people he cares about, it’s ineffective: he slaps a man in the face with his glove and winds up feeling foolish, misaims a snowball and breaks his wife’s glasses, and utterly fails to connect with his daughter. Cage is masterful in roles like this. He doesn’t chew the scenery, and he’s able to be sympathetic in a role that is the embodiment of all those worries insecure people have.
The rest of the cast is equally solid. Caine is magisterial and imposing as a father who has very nearly given up on his son. Robert is from a different time in many ways, but he wants the best for his family and seems to despair of them managing to achieve it. The two kids are spot-on. Anyone who was an outcast as a youngster will cringe in sympathy with them. As Noreen, Davis embodies exasperation. David must have been an unbearably frustrating man to be married to, and Davis manages to bring across both Noreen’s strengths and her utter incompatibility with David.
“The Weather Man” is a wonderful look at a woeful man. It’s sad, but in the way that some beautiful paintings are: you sigh or cringe or weep in sympathy and don’t look away. It’s a meditation on the plight of the everyman in modern America, and while it’s painful to watch at times it also rings very true.