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The Weather Man Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: R (for strong language and sexual content) Genre: Comedy, Drama Theater release: October 28, 2005 by Paramount Pictures Directed by: Gore Verbinski Runtime: 1 hour 42 minutes Cast: Nicolas Cage (David Spritz), Michael Caine (Robert Spritz), Hope Davis (Noreen), Gemmenne de la Peña (Shelly), Nicholas Hoult (Mike) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

The Weather Man is sort of a feel-good downer comedy, if there can be such a thing. Nicolas Cage plays David Spritz, a man who knows little about meteorology but is paid about a quarter-million dollars to spend a few hours each day at a local Chicago TV station, where he stands in front of a green screen and reads the weather reports off a teleprompter. You might think this would open up all sorts of opportunities for him, but nearly everything in his personal life has taken a turn for the worse. His wife has divorced him, his children have serious social and self-esteem problems, and his father—a prize-winning novelist whose cool, detached demeanor keep him emotionally separated from David—may be dying. What's more, total strangers bug David with questions about the weather or throw product placements—er, I mean, fast-food leftovers—at him, and all because he's a famous face who does very little work for big bucks. No wonder he feels so hollow.

Nicolas Cage plays the titular role as Dave Spritz

And yet the audience with whom I saw the film laughed quite consistently throughout. Cage can be such a quirky, odd duck that watching him try to make sense of normal family life has an inherently amusing quality. But some of the laughter may have been of the nervous or disbelieving kind. Early on, David's father Robert (Michael Caine) tells him that his overweight daughter Shelly (Gemmenne de la Peña) is mocked by her classmates—Robert calls them "her colleagues"—who call her "Camel Toe" because the pants she wears are awfully tight in a certain area. This term is repeated by various characters throughout the film, and just in case Robert's clinically accurate explanation of the term's meaning was not clear enough, we are shown a quick series of close-ups of examples.

If being repeatedly reminded of a girl's nether regions isn't creepy enough, it seems David's 15-year-old son Mike (About a Boy's Nicholas Hoult) may have even bigger problems looming on the horizon. Having been caught with marijuana, Mike now spends time with a counselor, Don (Gil Bellows), who seems just a little too eager to make an impression on him—buying him clothes, having him over for dinner, taking pictures, and so on. These scenes, too, elicited a fair bit of laughter, partly due to the obviousness with which Don seems to be pursuing his quarry, and partly due to his utter cluelessness as to how obvious he is. But just as this subplot seems to be building up to something, it fizzles out. There is some sort of incident, and there are conflicting accounts of this incident, and David hears about it after the fact; but whereas most films would use David's (and the audience's) reliance on second-hand information to sow some doubt and to build up to a much bigger revelation later on, this film merely brings that part of the story to a pat, tidy close.

In yet another fatherly role, Michael Caine plays Dave's dad

Similarly, it is not at all clear why, in one early scene, we see Shelly sitting and smoking with a friend and cussing about some other girl. This is never followed up in any of the scenes that follow. When Shelly tells her father that she "knows" what her nickname means—"Camel toes are tough," she says—are we supposed to think, based on this scene, that she is worldlier and smarter than this, but she is protecting her father from knowing that she knows why the kids call her this? Or does this scene merely illustrate how lame her own life is? Either way, it feels like something got cut somewhere along the way here, too.

For the most part, there is an emotional ambivalence to this film that is reminiscent of the films of Alexander Payne. Just as we never quite know whether we're laughing with or at the characters in Sideways or About Schmidt, so too we never quite know if we're supposed to identify with the consistently depressed and melancholic characters who populate The Weather Man, or feel superior to them. And the fact that Hope Davis, the pushy, demanding daughter of About Schmidt (and the pushy, demanding sister in the recent Proof) plays Cage's pushy, demanding ex-wife certainly doesn't work against this impression. But writer Steve Conrad (Wrestling Ernest Hemingway) and director Gore Verbinski—who seems to be taking a break between Pirates of the Caribbean flicks to prove that he can do more grown-up movies, too—don't quite trust us to settle for this, so they fill the script with important life lessons and nudge the story toward an arbitrarily upbeat ending.

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