| NOTHING LIKE A HURRICANE : Gore Verbinski's 'The Weather Man' [3/10] |
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| Wednesday, 22 February 2006 | |
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After Pirates of the Caribbean and The Ring - and before the imminent Pirates II and III - Verbinski takes an ill-advised (sideways) detour into "serious" film-making with the ostentatiously dour Weather Man. Never a director to impose any particular authorial stamp on a movie, Verbinski has always been heavily reliant on the quality of his script - and unfortunately for him, Steven Conrad's screenplay is an interminable, stilted series of hokey/quirky/gloomy life-lessons masquerading as a mature/intelligent/bittersweet family drama. The interminable, oppressively didactic results contrive to waste the combined talents of Nicolas Cage, Michael Caine and Hope Davis - the latter far from being the only strong reminder of Alexander Payne's About Schmidt (whose under-a-cloud poster imagery is blatantly 'hommaged' by this picture's UK ad-campaign). Indeed, one might be tempted to label The Weather Man as "Payne lite" - except there's absolutely nothing 'lite' or 'light' about this smugly lugubrious enterprise, from the too-loud, sub-American Beauty jingly-jangly-plinky-plonky score (credited to Hans Zimmer and James S Levine) to cinematographer Phedon Papamichael's drab, bluey-greyey visuals. The story is a hand-me-down affair, recycling ideas from countless other, better movies. Fortyish Chicago TV weatherman Dave Spritz (Cage) is on the verge of landing a very well-paid gig on a major New York station. But he's suffering a severe mid-life crisis: "Where joy should reign, these skies restrain" as a-ha's Morten Harket once sang. His existential woes are exacerbated by the attentions of his 'fans' (who often throw fast-food items at him from passing cars), his stormy relationship with his ex-wife Noreen (Davis) and the growing pains being experienced by both his 15-year-old son Mike (Nicholas Hoult) and 12-year-old daughter Shelly (Gemmenne de la Pena). Another permanent source of angst is Dave's ageing father Robert Spritzel (Caine), a Pulitzer-winning novelist who treats his son with a disapproving disdain. Dave has been labouring on his own novel ('Breaking Point') for some time with unsatisfactory results - and the filial bond is placed under further strain when Robert is diagnosed with terminal cancer. It's always a hostage to fortune when a scriptwriter makes his protagonist a lousy writer - and while the hapless Dave's 'Breaking Point' does indeed sound dire from the extracts we hear, on this evidence Conrad's own literary merits are nothing to (ahem) write home about: in terms of his namesakes, closer to Cannon star William (or even pop-pin-up Jess) than the legendary Polish/Ukraine-born novelist Joseph. A look ahead at Conrad's future projects makes for grim reading: Will Smith vehicle Pursuit of Happyness [sic] is reportedly in post-production, with Chad Schmidt (starring Brad Pitt) also in the pipeline - perhaps Conrad should have gone the whole hog and called the latter About Chad Schmidt. Because while Payne's much-vaunted "humanism" doesn't really bear very close inspection, Conrad's is of papier-mache robustness. A case in point: the disgraceful sidelining of Lauren (Judith McConnell), mother of one of the two main characters (Dave) and wife of the other (Robert), but who has about two lines during the whole movie and absolutely nothing to do. Why even bother creating the character at all? Instead of developing what could and should have been an individual with a unique viewpoint on the film's events, Conrad wastes our time with a thuddingly unsubtle subplot involving Mike's 'drug counsellor' Don (Gil Bellows) a creepily loathsome/hissable sexual predator who's not so much a character as a two-dimensional plot device. Likewise, Conrad thinks it's a bright idea to have Dave take up archery - allowing him to show off all the toxophilitic terms he's managed to pick up (off the internet?) and deliver an oh-so-meaningful scene in which Dave (dressed only in a suit, despite the subzero winter weather) fires arrows into a set of iced-up targets. "There's a lesson here," he remarks at one point - and indeed there is: Conrad's script is so packed with homilies that there's no room for the characters to breathe. This climaxes with Caine's Robert informing us (and Dave) that "in this shit life we must chuck some things. We must chuck some things, in this shit life." Yes, and that includes bad, waste-of-time films - especially ones which confuse verbose emotional constipation for maturity, such as The Weather Man (Cage fans would be much better off digging out their hero's last foray into this kind of territory, Brett Ratner's cruelly underrated Family Man.) Conrad also indulges himself with several blasts of 'stream-of-consciousness' interior monologue from Dave, which, while good for a laugh or two, feel very much like a screenwriter's show-offy affectation: "What happened to the guy who was trying to go around the world in a balloon?" muses Dave, "Did he make it? I should put some espionage or stolen plutonium in my novel. Tartar sauce. Spice it up. Fuck it's cold... Neil Young? Why am I thinking about Neil Young?" Beats me. Neil Young 22nd February, 2005 THE WEATHER MAN : [3/10] : USA (USA-Ger) 2005 (copyright-dated 2004) : Gore VERBINSKI : 102 mins (BBFC timing) seen at Odeon cinema, Newcastle-upon-Tyne (UK), 21st February 2006 - press show |
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