Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
As I was getting ready to leave the house the other day, it occurred to me that I haven’t seen a single new release so far this year. It hasn’t been a conscious decision, but I just haven’t made it to the theater for any of the January titles like ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 or ELEKTRA or WHITE NOISE or (shudder) RACING STRIPES. And since I’m not at Sundance this year, I’m not kicking the year off with the movie overdose that many critics are enjoying in Park City right now.
So what got me out of the house Tuesday afternoon? Well, Steve Conrad’s script for THE WEATHER MAN has been kicking around for a while, and I’ve always heard people speak highly of it. It took Gore Verbinski cashing in the clout he earned from the success of PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN and THE RING to finally get the film made. You’ve got to give Paramount credit for taking a chance on a film that is not immediately commercially obvious, especially not one that seems like a typical Paramount movie. If I could compare this to any film of theirs in recent memory, it would be WONDER BOYS. This feels like an adaptation of a novel, even though it isn’t. It’s small-scale, character-driven, and textured in a way that I found quite involving.
Nicolas Cage stars at Dave Spritz, a local TV weather man who is struggling to figure out his life. When he’s on TV, he’s confident and polished, all smiles. In his daily life, though, he’s a catastrophe. He’s divorced from his wife Noreen (the always-reliable Hope Davis), but he doesn’t seem able to process what happened between them. Both of his kids are troubled, but in very different ways. His son Mike (Nicholas Hoult) got busted with pot and is going through a rehab program, while his daughter Shelly (Gemmenne de la Pena) has a terrible weight problem and seems miserable. Dave’s famous father, an internationally acclaimed novelist (Michael Caine), tries not to make Dave feel any worse about things, but he casts a long shadow over Dave’s life simply by virtue of the example he sets, and all Dave wants is to sort his life out enough to impress him.
And that’s about it. There’s no gimmick, no high-concept twist. It’s just a film about this guy dealing with all of these pressures and edging closer and closer to a possible breaking point. Nicolas Cage is an actor who I find occasionally frustrating, but it’s not because of a lack of talent. Quite the opposite, in fact. When I see him in crap like GONE IN 60 SECONDS, it seems like such a waste. Here, he’s got a strongly-written character to play and no easy quirks to fall back on. He does a wonderful job of letting us into Dave’s mind. There’s one scene in particular, when Dave flashes back to a key moment in the breakdown of his marriage, that is so real that you end up laughing in sheer horror. Cage manages to invest Dave with a sort of rumpled dignity even at his lowest moments. Everyone else does good work as well. Michael Caine admirably underplays his role as Dave’s dying father. It would have been easy for the character to be overbearing, disapproving, a bully. Instead, Caine plays him as a great man who doesn’t lord it over everyone else. He really does love his son, and he wants to see him succeed. De la Pena has a difficult role as Dave’s daughter, and she handles it really well. Hoult’s changed a lot since his starring role in ABOUT A BOY, and his scenes with Gil Bellows, who plays one of his drug counselors who takes too much of an interest in him, are really creepy. Davis does her typical great job as Dave’s justifiably angry ex-wife, and it’s easy to understand why she had to move on.
There are a number of big laughs in the film, but it’s not a comedy. There’s an current of real pain that underscores everything here, and there’s a courage to the way the film doesn’t offer up easy resolutions to the very real problems that it sets up for Dave and his family. It’s a movie about small epiphanies, not unrealistic band-aids for the emotional wounds they’ve all suffered. Cage sells it all, whether he’s dealing with the constant random abuse he suffers at the hands of strangers who throw things like milkshakes and McDonald’s apple pies at him, or trying to help his daughter deal with being called “camel-toe” by her peers, or confronting Bellows over his deviant misbehavior towards his son. Verbinski manages to balance some really tricky tonal shifts quite well, and the result is a film that has more weight to it than you might expect at first glance, and one that genuinely seems to have something to say.
This year was the first time I was able to have my parents visit Austin during the Butt-Numb-A-Thon, something I’ve wanted to do for a little while now. For me, the highlight of the entire experience was talking to them afterwards, when they commented to me how much it meant to them to see me in my element. They definitely got a glimpse into my daily professional life, not only as we enjoyed the festival, but also over the course of the days leading up to it, since my writing partner Scott Swan and I were having to pitch for a job over the phone because of time constraints. My parents told me how much they enjoyed seeing me work at my chosen profession, something that I’ve wanted to do since I was a kid. That was pretty incredible to hear, and I think we all yearn for the approval of our parents on some level. Even if someone has a difficult relationship with their parents, they still find that much of what they do is a reaction to them, either to prove them wrong or to show them what you’re capable of, and much of THE WEATHER MAN deals with this idea. Dave’s ambitions aren’t about himself so much as they are ways for him to prove things to his famous father or his estranged wife or his own kids. That’s the material that I thought was the strongest in the film, and it carries a real punch.
This must have been good for Verbinski, and it shows in the quiet confidence that his work exudes here. Working with cinematographer Phedon Papamichael (SIDEWAYS), he’s created a grey and chilly world that mirrors the ice that has formed around Dave’s heart, and the gradual thaw is quite affecting. Hans Zimmer’s score is solid, if unmemorable. The film represents a bit of a marketing challenge for Paramount, but hopefully they’ll emphasize the performances, the moments between Cage and Caine or Cage and Davis, and the film’s slightly left-of-center sense of humor. The movie’s opening the same day as SIN CITY, and the trailer I saw for it didn’t exactly floor me. It’s the kind of movie that is hard to sum up in two-and-a-half minutes, but if you’re willing to give it a chance, it’s a rich and rewarding charmer, and a really nice way to kick off 2005.
I’ve got a number of screenings set up in the next week or so, including two Oscar-nominated films that are just now getting a release (the German-language DOWNFALL and Kirby Dick’s documentary TWIST OF FAITH), the Bruce Willis film HOSTAGE (which I want to see because I loved the director’s last film, NID DE GUEPES), Dimension’s big Sundance acquisition WOLF CREEK, and, if I’m lucky, a few very cool early surprises. I’ll be back with reports on all of them, plus a pair of DVD SHELF columns over the weekend. Until then...
"Moriarty" out.
