This film is most enjoyable for a script that contains clever, and often wise, dialogue between parents and children of all ages.
By:Bob Brown
This film has such an unrelentingly dark undertone, it’s surprising how many laughs it sneaks in. Gore Verbinski (Pirates of the Caribbean) directs from a script by Steve Conrad (Wrestling Ernest Hemingway), eliciting from Nicholas Cage (Chicago weather man Dave Spritz) and Michael Caine (Dave’s father) two of the more interesting, and quietly controlled, performances of the season.
This is one movie where the dreadful and unremitting trailers simply give no hint of what the script is about. A weather man who is the target of frustrated viewers would be such a cliché.
It’s only incidentally about TV viewers dumping (literally) on the unreliable weather man. More to the point, it’s a coming-of-age movie about a middle-aged father (Dave) who has trouble growing up, even while he’s trying to guide his 12-year-old daughter Shelly (Gemmene de la Pena) and her older brother Mike (Nicholas Hoult) in the right life choices. In turn, Dave’s father (Caine) shows the world-weariness of a parent who can’t stop micro-parenting even to the point of steering Dave toward the proper advice for the two grandchildren so they will not be warped by their father’s ineptitude.
The film is most enjoyable for a script that contains some clever, and often wise, dialogue between parents and children of all ages. Most effective is the deadpan, subdued delivery of the two main actors, Cage and Caine. Without cracking a smile, Dave muses with specificity on the variety of fast foods that have been thrown at or onto him by TV viewers over the years, while the steaming remnants of a hot apple pocket pie ooze down his lapels.
He agonizes over tartar sauce, which he suspects led to the breakup of his marriage to Noreen (Hope Davis). She has taken over their Chicago McMansion and assumed a new fiancé. A voiceover flashback shows Dave rushing to the store to place the evening’s dinner order, remembering Noreen’s strict instructions not to forget the tartar sauce. On the few blocks it takes, Dave chants a "tartar sauce, tartar sauce" mantra, only to have it dissolve amid the onrush of unbidden thoughts that crowd in as he sees an attractive girl on the street, or thinks of popular culture. Back home, the forgotten tartar sauce elicits a lie, a double-check by Noreen, and an evening-long shouting match.
Good as the performances are, some things in the plot make little sense. It’s not at all clear why Dave and Noreen got married in the first place, let alone why they are getting divorced. They fight as though they were once fiercely attached, yet we never see flashbacks to those happier times. We see only their amusing attempts at group marriage therapy. The trust exercises prove that neither trusts the other and that Noreen has never been attracted to Dave. Yet when they meet to exchange the children (Noreen occupies the family home after their separation),Noreen treats Dave as though he’s a neighbor, not hersoon-to-be ex.
Voiceovers are a somewhat stilted technique to show the amusing byways Dave’s mind takes as he wanders over the minutia of his depressing life. Everything bad that can happen seems to happen to Dave, including the unpredictability of the weather he’s predicting. But without his musings, the events themselves would simply be, well, depressing. Dave holds on to his depression as though working a sore tooth. "In this sh-t life," his father tells him, in one of the many fatherly-advice scenes, "you’ve just got to chuck things." Dave’s trouble is he can’t chuck things.
Besides his failed marriage, one of the mysteries he can’t chuck is why the weather happens. He doesn’t have a meteorology degree. The station meteorologist tells him to accept "variances," that the wind "just blows." But Dave excels in front of a green-screen, pointing the right way as isobars and cold fronts flash across the superimposed computer simulations. Despite his depressing private life, the weather man in him presents a confident, friendly, "fresh" face to morning TV viewers, talking of air patterns he doesn’t believe in.
And so, while his life barometer trends downward, his career is going in the opposite direction. And that’s another inexplicable part of Dave’s makeup. Dave agrees with his father that he needs to "knuckle down." Yet he is in the final rounds for a plum job as a network weather man in New York. The suggestion is that women viewers who find him cute count for rising ratings, but male viewers want to punch in his glib face which is perhaps why he’s a fast food target. And that leads to musings about "Why fast food?"
This quirky movie, with a funky gamelan-inspired score by Hans Zimmer, can be as messy as a taco-splattered suit. It’s often amusing and just as often seems to make little sense. But, as Mark Twain once said of the weather in New England, if you don’t like it, just wait a few minutes.
Rated R. Contains strong language and sexual content.

