The Weatherman

Another movie related rant after my Rang De Basanti review! This time about "The Weatherman" starring Nicholas Cage and Michael Caine, written by Steven Conrad and directed by Gore Verbinski. Let me start with a couple of quotes from this masterpiece, which has left an aftertaste in my mind on the same scale as that left after reading Somerset Maugham's "Of Human Bondage".

"I remember once imagining what my life would be like, what I'd be like. I pictured having all these qualities, strong positive qualities that people could pick up on from across the room. But as time passed, few ever became any qualities that I actually had. And all the possibilities I faced and the sorts of people I could be, all of them got reduced every year to fewer and fewer. Until finally they got reduced to one, to who I am. And that's who I am, the weather man..." (To any Ayn Rand fan, this is as contrasting to the "Each man at the beginning of his life has a vision...." quote as it can get)

"Easy doesn't enter into grown-up life..." (how sadly true!)

I watched this movie at a few thousand feet above Iceland and parts of the North Atlantic, right after I watched Elizabethtown (a nice though uneven and relatively naive movie) and its intelligence, its poignance and its depth made me close my eyes and think about it and digest it before I wrote about it. It leaves a mean hangover!

This is the story of Dave Spritz, a Chicago TV weatherman who is quite good at what he does, and on the brink of making it really big in the form of a New York based nation-wide weatherman job. But that, as you probably suspect, is only the surface story. Look closer.

His personal life is in shambles - his relationships with his children, his ex-wife, his dying father are all headed to hell in a handbasket, and nothing he tries to avert this seems to work. From simple tasks like getting his father a cup of coffee or a paper, to major things like reconnecting with his kids or sorting out issues with his former wife in a counselling session, he fumbles and screws his way through a lovingly made two and a half hours. (Hats off to the writer and director) Everything he does seems to turn out badly, as though the entire universe were bent on making his life miserable.

He thinks his job is meaningless and a sham - he wants to be a writer, but is horrible at writing... He starts to make a speech in his father's "living funeral", and the lights go out, so he doesn't finish. At one point, his ex-wife tells him exactly why she hated giving him a blowjob... accidentally in front of his daughter. In a nutshell, this is not a happy tale.

Another reviewer on the web compared this movie to American Beauty, and I can see where he's coming from. Although the two movies have very little in common, they evoke a similar mental knee jerk. This is a deep movie, and writing about what touched me the most in it is difficult because it touched me on so many levels. Cage and Caine turn in performances that make you want to worship them at an altar. This is definitely Cage's best ever... Caine has too strong a body of work for me to say the same for him.

One thing I can say for sure - it made me laugh. I am no fan of dark comedy (I hate "Death Becomes Her" with all my heart) but this movie made me laugh. In all the little flaws and big gaffes that Dave Spritz goes through, no matter how grave the consequence, I was laughing even as I tsk-tsked for poor Dave, probably because I empathized with him so much. I saw my own struggles at conforming with my own self-image personified in this guy.

For example, in a counselling session, the ex-husband and wife each write down one thing they find despicable about each other on a piece of paper, and exchange the notes. The idea is to build/ display trust by never reading what the other has written, although it would be so easy to do. Dave reads his wife's comment the first chance he gets. I've never really had a clean record when it comes to respecting another's privacy... and I was hooting with rather sheepish laughter. It is imperfections and contradictions like these - small and large - that cost Dave most of what is meaningful in his life... and by the end of the movie he has lost quite a bit.

The end is particularly reminiscent of a Somerset Maugham tale. While Dave does manage to make amends with his kids, and his father (before he dies of a lymphoma) after a fashion, his hopes of getting back together with his wife are dashed. He finally learns to live with the fact that he is a weatherman and nothing more, and he moves to NYC for the new job.

It isn't a happy ending - or not the happiest feasible ending within the parameters of the tale - but it is a grown up ending, and as the second quote goes (from Dave's Pulitzer winning father, Robert - played superbly by Michael Caine) "Easy doesn't enter into grown up life".

As I said the movie is deep, and there are a billion different things I want to say about it, but the best thing would be to urge you, the reader, to go watch it yourself, and make your own connection with Dave Spritz. There are so many motifs I did not mention - people throwing junk food at the poor man (and his realization about why they only throw junk food), his eventual passion for archery (and a scene where he takes aim at his romantic rival) and so on which add so much flavor to the tale, but cannot be written about adequately.

In a nutshell, this movie ranks high, alongside movies like Eternal Sunshine... or American Beauty, or Before Sunset, or Finding Forrester and so on. Literarily speaking, Conrad weaves a tale as lovely as short stories by Chekov and Tolstoy and novels by Maugham... and so on. Dardi hai. But a warning... Do not attempt to watch this with the average joe boy/ girlfriend, parent or suchlike. The thematic and linguistic content is, well, adult.

Otherwise, go - watch. NOW. And savor.