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Cage's 'Weather Man' everyman isn't sympathetic
"The Weather Man"
Melinda Sue Gordon/Paramount Pictures
R for strong language and sexual content.
In wide release.
Here's a guy who makes $240,000 a year for what he acknowledges is the easiest of jobs, smirking and reading weather forecasts off the prompter for a Chicago TV station.
He supplements his income with fees from equally effortless personal appearances, which present him with other perks, such as easy sex with women who view the local weather guy as a celebrity.
He has a support system of people willing to truly care for him, if only he'd let them.
And he's a front-runner for a national gig that would pay him more than a million bucks a year.
Yet all this chump does is groan and moan about how hard his life is and how nothing goes his way.
This is no everyman the rest of us can relate to. This is a pampered weasel so bizarrely preoccupied with his own mostly imagined travails that you'll likely react with indignation rather than sympathy over his sighing and sobbing.
Cage clearly saw something more to the character and plays him with earnest, though it ends up a largely two-dimensional labor of gloom and anguish.
What salvages "The Weather Man" from time to time is the grand presence of Michael Caine as Cage's father, whose own real drama is so engrossing and heartfelt, you wish he were the main man and his son the supporting player.
Cage's David Spritz is a master at grinning and spinning the weather, yet he's constantly buffeted by turbulence in his personal life. He's unhappy over his divorce and pressures his ex-wife (Hope Davis) to get back together even though she's involved with another man (Michael Rispoli).
David has troubles with the kids, his teen son (Nicholas Hoult), who's a recovering substance abuser, and his chubby, disconsolate daughter (Gemmenne de la Pena).
Always feeling inferior to his father (Caine), a Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar who was a buddy to world leaders in his day, David now must cope with his father's terminal cancer.
So yes, David does have real problems. Yet other than his father's illness, the domestic issues in his life feel almost certainly David's own fault.
Copyright 2009 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
