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Area of depression over comedy
THE WEATHERMAN - Directed by Gore Verbinski
Certificate 15
DIRECTOR Gore Verbinski’s films – Mousehunt
and The Ring amongst them – have a bit of a downer built
into them. This does not mean, as in the case of Pirates of
the Caribbean, that Verbinski’s films are always full of
dips and ebbs. The Weatherman falls into the former category,
however, being a somewhat dreary comedy with a well-intentioned
centre.
Alas the film doesn’t quite reach the heights it wants
to achieve. Nicolas Cage plays a local Chicago celebrity –
a TV weather reporter – trying to make sense of his failed
personal life. He has split with his wife (Hope Davis, who seems
to be taking over wifey roles with great regularity).
He wants to earn the respect of his successful novelist father
(Michael Caine, pictured below with Cage) and to be a father
to his two children, one of whom is taking a counsellor to be
his spiritual father while the other, an overweight daughter,
tries her best to make her father seem more inept than ever.
Cage, with bad hair and little sympathy in the way of character
delineation, puts in a wonderful if spare performance as we
watch his unremitting misery. It is as if being a weather man
makes his life as temporal and unpredictable as the weather
itself and like the weather there is little to be done to improve
matters.
It isn’t bad enough that, as the local celeb, Cage’s
character gets soaked by passing motorists who can’t seem
to help flinging their drinks and food at him as they drive
by.
By turns a depressed-feeling comedy which has, at its core,
some savoury moments, The Weather Man is not a laugh riot.
It has, however, within its grey and frustrated shell, a sweetmeat
at its centre.
The moral of the story? Life is mysterious and even the famous
have their insurmountable problems. |
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