The Weather Man

It really takes some skill for a movie to make us empathize with a man who, by all rights, is an absolute asshole. David Spritz (Nicholas Cage) is that kind of man. The Weatherman is that kind of movie. He 's misguided and selfish, lazy, dishonest, and distracted, but in the end not mean or malicious. It isn't just that he's the one who narrates the yarn that makes us feel sorry for him; we can see to a degree, where the decisions and mistakes he's made have taken him, and can hear the regret in his voice as he tells it. Beyond it all is a longing to make things better, even though he's completely misguided in his efforts.

Please note: Entries about media reviewed in this blog are written from the perspective that the reader has already seen the work in question and desires further commentary or explanation. Plot twists and endings will sometimes be examined.

The movie sort of starts in the middle of things. David Spritz introduces himself to the audience as a guy who's seperated from his wife and sees his kids occasionally. He's successful, we can tell by looking at his life, though all in all, we can see that he's also complacent and lazy.

He explains that his job doesn't really require very much work out of him, that despite the fact he ends up sitting around the news office for much of the time he's there, his paychecks are still very high. He's not even a meteorologist, he doesn't predict the weather, just provides a face for it. Because his face is well known from TV, sex comes easily to him without much work as well, but the drawback is that people often approach him too, and talk to him like they know him even when he wants to be left alone. In an ealry scene we see him wating in line at the DMV and get hassled by a fan who initially tries to be friendly with him until Dave lies to him about not being the weather man (the fan can see Dave's name right on the form he filled out and knows he's being lied to, demonstrating what an immature way it is to to handle the unwanted attention).

Every now and then people throw food at him too. Fast food only- he'll observe later, noting that it's something disposable they'd rather not finish, and that compared to the other sections of the news programs -which have more substance- he, himself as the weatherman is like fast food.

Despite having isolated himself from them with his attitude and demeanor, Dave's family still cares about him, though they are going through trials of their own. His daughter Shelly (Gemmenne De La Peña) is obese and unhappy and, as revealed by Dave's father (Michael Caine), is cruelly being called "camel toe" by the other kids at school. The first time I saw the movie I remember thinking "Man, is there anything Michael Caine can't do? Now he's explaining to a whole generation what a camel toe is in a dignified way. If only more people had seen this movie..." Dave's son Mike (Nicholas Hoult) is 15 years old and was recently caught with pot and now sees a counselor who has an unhealthy interest in him. His seperated wife, Noreen (Hope Davis), is now living with another man, Russ (Michael Rispoli) whom he openly dislikes. In an ealry scene Dave takes Shelly iceskating, who falls and hurts herself, and we see the way he bristles at this man who forcefully mediates between Dave and Noreen when she questions him accusingly "What did you do?" (though it's clear Russ only defends her when Dave tries to argue back). Dave is very juvenile in behavior at times and it shows when he responds to their criticism at cursing by doing it even more to spurn them on. More trying than anything else however, is the situation with Dave's father, Robert, a Pulitzer Prize winning author who it is revealed early in the film has lymphoma and will probably die in the very near future. Dave is ever trying to impress this man who's shadow he's lived in his entire life. When offered an interview for the weather man position at "Hello America", a national TV show with Bryant Gumbel and significant step up from his current position, he childishly sets it on the passenger seat when picking up his dad to try and get him to notice (Robert sits right on it).

Robert wants his son to be more mature and responsible. "The right thing to do and the thing that is most difficult are often one and the same. Easy doesn't enter into grown up life" he tells him at one point. We hear Dave's thoughts as he sorts things out and yearns for a way to make his father proud. "Don't die yet Dad, let me pull things together. I can make things work with Noreen and the kids and get this 'Hello America' job." We can see that he misses his old life because he occasionally sits in his car, parked outside the house he once lived in and stares in silence at it. His longing to make things better is clearly there though we'll soon see exactly how screwed up his attempts are.

He and Noreen go to couples' therapy hoping to reconcile to some degree. While there, the two of them are told to write something they've never said before but always hated about the other on a piece of paper and give it to them. And then never read it to build trust. Dave breaks this promise before the therapy session is even over and reads the note in the bathroom (she hated his attempted sci-fi novel, which looks to us in the audience more like an effort to impress his dad than anything else). When Dave confronts Noreen about what he's read, she is furious with him for breaking his word and the fight they have afterwards ends in shouting and cursing.

Aside from the fast food that makes it's way at him from time to time, another tangentially related detail to Dave as a character in the movie is archery. It starts originally as an activity Dave tries out with Shelly to bond with her, though she almost immediately loses all interest in it, leaving him the remaining lessons in the package he bought her. He begins doing it as a solitary way to spend time and quickly finds it helps him by providing focus which is lacking in his everyday life.

A trip to New York for Dave's "Hello America" interview and a second opinion on Robert's condition starts off promising when Dave tries talking to Shelly about the "camel toe" teasings. When he asks her if she knows why they call her that, she replies "Cause camel toes are tough. They can walk all over the desert without getting burned." Seeing that the mockery she is getting is actually giving her strength (about as good of advice as any parent can give regarding bullying), Dave decides not to tell her what it really means and instead opts for the different approach of buying her a new wardrobe which is largely is comprised of dresses. However, things turn sour very quickly when Dave receives a phone call informing him that Mike has been arrested for some trouble with his counselor (who it's said molested him), and Robert's diagnosis comes in confirming he will die in only a short time. Dave spends the whole night up drinking and brooding and the sense of dread that he'll fail this interview seeps in. The next morning, however, he does surprisingly well and leaves his interviewers impressed. I really liked an interchange he had with Bryant Gumbel (played by himself) in this scene. When asked if he's nervous he simply says "no". "You seem nervous", Gumbel follows up, and when Dave replies simply "I'm not nervous", "Other stuff then?" Gumbel confirms softly. So much is left unsaid yet we understand it all. The movie does let us know that, even if he's not a meteorologist, Dave is fairly good at his job which requires a sense of space, timing, and improvisation as well to deal with a green screen. I sometimes wonder if it was because of sorrow over his father's diagnosis that Dave did well in the interview. Perhaps he was more honest than usual? Even if we're sad or hurt at least the honesty makes us more vulnerable and allows others to look closer in.

Dave returns home and promptly confronts Mike's counselor by punching him in the face and threatening him before returning to his son. Shortly after that Dave is offered the "Hello America" job but, depressed and apathetic, doesn't accept immediately leaving the audience to wonder if this will get screwed up as well. Then comes Robert's "living funeral", a gathering of family and friends to give everyone a chance to say how they feel about him before he passes on. Dave tells Noreen about the job, and asks her if she'll give him a second chance, feeling they and the kids could go to New York and start over again. But Noreen instead tells Dave she's decided to marry Russ, crushing his hopes for reconciliation once and for all. Dave goes out for target practice during a break in the proceedings, and we can just feel his pain and anger as he even takes aim at Russ at one point in this very tense scene. Next comes another wrenching moment as Dave's turn to speak to the crowd about his father gets ruined when the building loses power just after he starts his speech. It's almost like the final insult fate could throw at him at this point; he's just been completely robbed of a chance to say something kind or inspirational about the father he'll soon lose.

But then a few days after the whole ordeal is over, Dave is stopped by Robert for a quiet talk in his car. Robert asks Dave about the opening part of his speech (which involves a Bob Seger song), showing that he was really paying attention to what Dave was saying. Things get emotional as Dave tells his father about the job offer but then breaks down in tears when he reveals what has happened with Noreen. But Robert tells Dave he's proud of his achievements as a weather man, landing such a high position and also reveals to him part of why he's successful as a writer (he knows about and has read Dave's novel); he says simply that he just kept doing it until he got good at it, but that it took years to do. It's an important scene, giving the two of them a final sense of closure.

The movie concludes with Robert's funeral and Dave's narration telling us that he accepted the job and moved to New York. He appears to have made peace with who he is and how things have turned out. All the possibilities for people he could've been gradually got whittled away as he got older, he explains, until he ended up the person he is, the weather man. He still returns to Chicago, seeing his kids on the weekend in visits. He also continues his archery, and no longer gets food thrown at him, though he jokingly wonders if it's because he now carries a bow around with him. The closing shots are of him riding a float in a parade with Bryant Gumbel and the others from his show. "I'm behind the fire brigade, but in front of Spongebob" he observes, juxtaposing his earlier conclusion that he was "fast food".

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Throughout the film, themes of maturity are discussed as we look at this character who has somehow managed to dodge responsibility and still become "successful" in life, if one could call it that. Dave might have coasted by in life as long as he has, but that he is a disfunctional person as the film starts is evident as we watch things catch up with him over the course of it all. The film demonstrates quite effectively that financial security doesn't necessarily spell success by showing us how a man like Dave, who should have everything going for him, is instead faced with problems of a different sort. Money cannot buy happiness, and that the walls in Dave's life are beginning to tumble down really show it.

"Easy doesn't enter in to grown up life", Robert says at one point, and Dave repeats it at the end as the sort of lesson he's learned. It would seem to be the movie's message to us, though I took something else away from it as well. Regardless of whether we're smart and accountable or oblivious and lazy, the rain falls on us all in the end. And life is as unpredictable as the weather.