Review of The Weather Man (2005) by Markb. — 07 Nov 2005

If you and I had been sitting in a bar a year ago, and you had tried to tell me that the director of Pirates of the Caribbean and Mouse Hunt's next project was going to be a character study that resembled the witty but somewhat downbeat work of Alexander Payne (About Schmidt, Sideways), my immediate response would've been to ask the bartender to cut you off.

Gore Verbinski deserves all the credit in the world for using his commercial clout to make this literate, challenging account of a highly self-absorbed individual in a midlife crisis (some might say "middle-age meltdown") who seems completely incapable of maintaining a satisfactory, mutually nurturing relationship with his ex-wife, his kids, his dying father, or anyone else; at its best, Steve Conrad's screenplay is reminiscent not only of such character- rather than plot-driven early 1970s films, such as Five Easy Pieces, that seriously questioned the meaning of success in America, but also some of the similarly-themed short stories of John Cheever and John Updike.

(Those moviegoers who address the fact that Dave Spritzel is a professional local TV weatherman who makes $240,000 a year with statements like, "Well, gee, if I brought home HIS paycheck, I'd be glad to have some of his unhappiness!" are not only missing the point entirely, but either never read Edwin Arlington Robinson's classic poem "Richard Cory", about a wealthy pillar of the community for whom financial success wasn't enough, or completely forgot that they had.

) The movie, photographed by Payne favorite Phedon Papamichael to make the city of Chicago where Spritzel works look like its weather consists 100% of clouds, rain and slush, is darkly funny and insightful most of the way; I thought the best scenes involved Spritzel's two adolescents, who are both dealing with serious growing pains but prove to be far more resilient and "adult" than their father.

(Overweight daughter Shelly's naively optimistic interpretation of a derogatory nickname given her by her classmates is a real heart-tugger.) Many audience members will find the heart of the movie to be in the faltering relationship between Dave and his dad Robert (a pitch-perfect Michael Caine), whose disapproval of everything Dave does is especially agonizing to Dave because Robert NEVER RAISES HIS VOICE.

As for Nicolas Cage as Spritzel, nobody does hangdog better; if someone gets the incredibly misguided notion of making a live-action movie about Charles Schulz's Peanuts gang in their 40s, here's the perfect Charlie Brown.

The Weather Man is so good when it's good, and it's so good much of the time, that it's even more frustrating when it's less so, especially since most of the flaws could've been corrected with maybe another rewrite or two: Dave's mother is a virtual nonentity; the film uses the comic device of having the last person in the world that you want to see or hear you doing or saying something embarrassing show up at just the time you're doing or saying it occurs about half a dozen times too often to keep being effective; wouldn't even a schlump like Dave keep a Visa or ATM card in his wallet--and what big US city in 2005 has convenience stores that allow 12-year-olds to purchase cigarettes? Then again, maybe the movie is its own object lesson in style as well as substance: namely, life is what it is, so learn to live with it.