Cast: Nicolas Cage, Michael Caine, Hope Davis, Nicholas Hoult, Gemmenne de la Peña, Gil Bellows, Michael Rispoli

Nicolas Cage is Dave Spritz, Chicago TV weather man. I’m not entirely sure whether it’s Chicago’s extreme and extremely variable weather conditions, or Dave’s inaccurate predictions, or his perpetually worried expression (except when he’s on air), that every so often causes strangers to throw fast food at him in the street, usually accompanied by a shouted “Hey, Weather man!” and malicious laughter. Whatever, Dave Spritz is a deeply unhappy man and a loser in every way but one – and even that is perversely soul-destroying.

His family seems rapidly to be spiralling apart – at least the part with him in it. Despite being divorced, Dave harbours a vain hope that he and ex-wife Noreen (Hope Davis) will be able to make a fresh start. His 15 year-old son Michael (Nicholas Hoult) is just out of drug rehab and on a collision course with more trouble if his creepy drug counsellor’s not-so-hidden agenda is not stopped. His 12 year-old daughter Shelly (Gemmenne de la Peña) is, in her grandfather’s words, “Grossly overweight and unhappy”, cultivating bitchy sledging and sneaking cigarettes to alleviate her unrelenting failure to achieve competency in anything she tries. His father Robert (Michael Caine) is doubly a source of grief. An author who at 33 wrote a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, an achievement Dave could never hope to emulate, he is now dying of lymphoma, with only a few months to live. It means Dave is running out of time in which to convince his father he is anything but a loser.

Most of the family, but especially Dave, oscillate between a kind of stunned apathy and intense bursts of anger. In Dave’s case, he directs his anger particularly towards any of his fans who approach him in public, encounters which invariably end in his being called an asshole.

The epitome of Dave’s sickness of soul is probably in the one exception to his total loserhood: his job. As a TV weather man he works two hours a day (plus appearances) and earns $240,000 per year. He gets paid handsomely for zero effort (and is on the short list of the fictional Hello America show with Bryant Gumbel in New York to be paid four times as much). Naturally he has somehow come to expect that zero effort will pay off in other areas of his life, namely his marriage. Dave is a man who had certain expectations of himself as he grew up, as he tells us in his voiced-over inner monologue. As his life progressed, all the qualities he hoped to manifest somehow got reduced to just one – who he is – and his conclusions as to what that is, exactly, are as severely lacking in self-knowledge as the rest of his philosophy.

The Chicago weather, which he cannot predict largely because he has neither a degree in meteorology nor the least understanding of it, is as divorced in effect from logical causes as his life. Unaware and stuck in self-defeating patterns of behaviour, Dave has no idea of how to manifest his hopes and dreams, as evidenced in his attempt to improve relations with his ex-wife by attending a group couples’ therapy course. He instantly fails the exercise designed to teach trust, by breaching it, and apparently is mystified as to why. Nevertheless he plugs away, using archery practice as a metaphor for focussing, getting on target, and practising time and again till he gets the bullseye. His self-revelation that the fast food that is regularly thrown at him reflects that he himself is “fast food, convenient, but ultimately not nourishing” is telling, but unfortunately Cage’s melancholy facial expression does not change, and we might almost miss the significance for a change in his life.

Michael Caine is dourly appropriate as the fatally ill Robert, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning language skills grapple puzzledly with coarse street vernacular, though not so much with his own life’s meaning as his son. Hope Davis is finely tuned as the exasperated ex-wife. As their daughter Shelly, Gemmenne de la Peña (Erin Brockovich) is most convincingly, uniformly gloomy and hopeless but for one brilliant scene where Dave’s unique effort to extend himself as a responsible parent actually works beautifully and elegantly. Nicholas Hoult (About a Boy) shines as son Michael on the cusp of innocence and terrible consequences.

Though a drama, director Gore Verbinski (Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, The Ring) intended the film to be funny in part, with us hopefully recognising ourselves in the hapless ‘hero’s’ journey. However, the movie’s tone throughout, like Dave’s character and the freezing Chicago weather, is overwhelmingly bleak and melancholic. It has the effect of inducing mind-numbing apathy in us too. The final resolution, meant to be Dave’s redemption, is apparently simple acceptance of the unpredictability of life. Based on his father’s new grasp of slang in his advice, “In this shit life, we have to chuck some things” he is apparently able to move on. The existential pointlessness of it all, however, permeates the entire movie, and is too tedious to be salutary.

© Avril Carruthers      15^th March 2006