The Weather Man

I really wanted to like "The Weather Man". I think Nicholas Cage (when he chooses to actually act instead of to walk through some misbegotten action movie travesty) is a terrific actor, with shades and layers and power. I also really like movies that explore people and ideas instead of explosions and unsubtle humor. I really wanted to like this movie.

Nicholas Cage plays Dave Spritz (nee Spritzer), a man whose life is an unrelenting mess. He's divorced from a wife who (pretty much) hates him; he's the father of a son in trouble with drugs and a homosexual pedophilic counselor; he tries and tries to connect with his disaffected and terribly obese daughter; and he's the son of a Pulitzer Prize-winning author (played rather woodenly by Michael Caine) who is deeply disappointed in him. Dave Spritz is a weather man, although even he is aware that his only talent lies in reading a teleprompter. He's not a meterologist -- he doesn't even understand much of what he cheerfully reads to his Chicago viewers. Ultimately, it's Dave Spritz who is disappointed in himself.

Cage is (mostly) terrific, although in more than one scene he substitutes an utter lack of reaction for a depressed introspection. Hope Davis, as his ex-wife, is similarly powerful -- but the real find in this movie is Nicholas Hoult, who plays the troubled son. Hoult is quintessentially a young man trying to reach adulthood while still carrying the twin baggage of his naivete and his dysfunctional family. He's by turns engaging and maddening, confused and confusing, mature and painfully non-wordly.

So why didn't I like this serious, artfull movie?

First, it should be noted that "The Weather Man" is unrelentingly depressing. It starts with a man and a family in trouble, and ends with a man whose issues remain unresolved, whose life remains lonely. That's not, in and of itself, reason to avoid a movie -- but it's certainly not, in and of itself, reason to rush into a movie, either.

The real problems I had with "The Weather Man" fell into two categories. First, this is a movie that uses voiceover extensively. Unnendingly, ubiquitously. It uses voiceover to introduce scenes; it uses voiceover to conclude scenes; it uses voiceover to remind us of the scene we've just watched. All this talking, all this background blathering has the strange effect of distancing the audience. Movies work viscerally best when they have an emotional immediacy. Dave Spritz's depressed rumination turns "The Weather Man" into someone else's sad and ancient history.

Worse, it hammers its metaphors. For example, in one nicely written scene, Cage eloquently describes the vagaries of weather, its unpredictability and volatility, but then observes (for the disengaged cretins who juuuust might have missed it) that "I am the weather". Nothing ruins a nice analogy quite as effectively as nudging the audience and saying "See? Analogy! This is an art film!" It's the cinematic equivalent of explaining a joke to the humorless....it doesn't amuse the humorless, and annoys those that got it in the first place.

Also, too many story elements are simply introduced and then dropped -- the story of the son's pedophilic counselor, for example, is examined for a while. Then, when the son gets in trouble for rejecting the counselor's advances, the parents are conflicted as to whether their son is telling the truth. It's a nice representation of the conflict all parents feel when their children are revealed to be less than perfect...but that element (like so many other elements of this film) is then dropped, never to be examined again. Ditto the rare glimpses we get of his daughter's tortured inner life; ditto his novel.

Finally, to my deep annoyance, Hollywood (with its seemingly bottomless talent for mis-representing film) has marketed this as some kind of James Brooksian dramady -- revealing the few comic moments of this movie in the trailers. This is most certainly not a dramady. "The Weather Man" will not send you out smiling -- it's no one's "feel good" movie, and marketing it like one not only utterly lies to the audience as to what kind of movie we're about to see, it also robs those few comedic moments of their power to lighten and humanize the mood.

Still, there is much -- much! -- to like about this movie and the performances. Despite Michael Caine's staidness early, his final scene -- describing how a parent never quits worrying about and parenting his children -- is eloquent and sweet, and (almost) worth the price of admission all by itself. Almost.

I just wish "The Weather Man" had been the movie it could have been, should have been, wanted to be. Instead, when I left the theatre, I wanted (needed!) to go find something to make me happy, to rinse off the pall that clung to me like poison ivy.