Nicolas Cage is the new king of voice-over. Something about the way he reads narration in his slightly sardonic, slightly knowing manner makes the interior monologues of his recent films, from Adaptation to Lord of War and the new The Weather Man, both appealing and entertaining, even for a device that can easily get tiresome. It helps, too, that Cage's narrating characters are all, to one degree or another, self-deprecating smartasses, and The Weather Man takes advantage of the actor's strength in that area, giving him an essentially unlikable protagonist to play and letting him turn the character into one the audience comes to like and even sympathize with.
That character is sad-sack weather announcer Dave Spritz, an outwardly successful man (he's a popular TV personality in Chicago, making good money and potentially being offered a job on a national morning show) who is utterly miserable about virtually everything in his life. His ex-wife Noreen (Hope Davis), for whom he still harbors feelings, is dating someone else; his overweight daughter Shelly (Gemmenne de la Peña) is sullen and resentful; his son Mike (Nicholas Hoult) is in drug counseling; and he is forever in the shadow of his father Robert (Michael Caine), a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist.
Even Dave's profession, at which he excels, isn't a source of satisfaction. He feels inadequate as someone whose job involves working two hours a day reading weather forecasts he doesn't even create (a real meteorologist predicts the weather), and yearns for the heft and respectability of his father's career. In a running gag that manages never to get old, Dave is periodically pelted with fast-food projectiles by angry viewers who weren't happy with the weather reports.
Director Gore Verbinski, who's had success with slick Hollywood products such as The Ring and Pirates of the Caribbean, brings a cool professionalism to the film that sometimes comes off as a little too glib for the serious, often depressing subject matter. Verbinksi demonstrated with The Ring that he knew how to shoot cold, detached urban life, and he and cinematographer Phedon Papamichael make Chicago look beautifully forbidding with its harsh environment of snow and ice.
Screenwriter Steve Conrad fills the script with plenty of dark comedy, much of it coming from Cage's entertaining narration. Dave is neurotic, selfish, insecure and a bad father, but Cage gives him an endearing sweetness, and accomplishes the impressive feat of making you feel sorry for a guy who gets depressed about being in the running for a million-dollar-a-year job. The rest of the cast also bring extra dimensions to their often unpleasant characters, with Caine perfectly nailing the vague condescension of the supposedly enlightened intellectual.
The Weather Man wants to say something profound about modern discontent, about how the things we devote our time to (such as, say, delivering TV weather reports) are completely divorced from what's important in life or what might make us happy. More often than you'd expect, actually, it even gets there, with the humor of Conrad's script doing a good job of putting across the pessimistic observations without seeming too heavy-handed. The problem is that the film never does more than smirk at life's meaninglessness, and its semi-upbeat ending doesn't feel earned. Verbinski's Hollywood experience gives the film a great look and engaging pace, but it's ultimately too superficial for the material.
Still, this is a movie concerned with tough questions, even if it never gets around to answering them. Released by a major studio, directed by a hit-maker and starring a big-name actor, it doesn't pander to the mainstream nor does it shy away from complexity. It's a downer, sure, but it'll have you smiling all the way to the bottom.