The Weather Man: Grade B

B

The Weather Man

Nicolas Cage, Michael Caine, Hope Davis

This is like two movies stitched together in the middle. In the first part Cage, a Chicago weatherman, is shown giving the weather on TV, and struggling to make contact with his ex wife and monosyllabic young children. But the story of the divorced dad seeing the kids on alternate weekends is hackneyed, and there is nothing new here. We don’t know anything about the weatherman, where he lives, what he eats, what music he likes. He is not a real person so I didn’t care about him. The first part is therefore quite boring. In the second half, the movie picks up so abruptly and forcefully that you wonder if there was a change in personnel on the crew. He interviews for a national TV job in NYC, makes contact with his daughter, speaks at his father’s funeral. In other words, things happen, allowing him to reveal who he is and we do care about him. The ending is an existential knockout. He’s in a Macy’s day parade, on the network’s float “behind the fire department, but ahead of Sponge Bob.” The archery theme, prominently displayed in trailers and on the DVD box, is a total irrelevance. Outstanding photography and fine acting by Hope Davis.