My World of Flops Stormy Weather Case File #197 Travolta/Cage Project #76 The Weather Man (2005)
The Travolta/Cage Project is an ambitious, years-long multi-media exploration of the fascinating, overlapping legacies of Face/Off stars John Travolta and Nicolas Cage with two components: this online column exploring the actor’s complete filmographies in chronological order and the Travolta/Cage podcast, where Clint Worthington, myself and a series of fascinating guests discuss the movies I write about here.
Read previous entries in the column here, listen to the podcast here, pledge to the Travolta/Cage Patreon at this blessed web address and finally follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/travoltacage
2005’s The Weather Man is a product of the brief but awesome period in the aughts when Cage apparently told his agent, “Look, if a movie isn’t 70 percent me doing sad narration I'm not interested.”
Cage morosely confiding in the audience was a whole mood throughout the aughts thanks to 2002’s Adaptation, 2004’s Matchstick Men and 2005’s The Weather Man and Lord of War. Conventional wisdom holds that screenwriters should never resort to narration unless it is absolutely necessary.
I can’t imagine any of these films without Cage’s narration, however. Heck, Lord of War is only slightly less of a one-man show than Secret Honor. Cage thankfully has the kind of personality and presence that makes it easy to listen to him talk directly to us for 90 to 120 minutes.
There’s something gloriously internal about each of these movies. They take place inside the frazzled minds of Cage’s neurotics as much as they do in the world outside it. These movies allow us to get unusually close to Cage’s troubled anti-heroes, to slip inside their tormented psyches.
An oddball, darkly comic 1970s character study/social satire that somehow got made in 2005 with the star of National Treasure and the blockbuster director of Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, The Weather Man is about a weatherman who is sad.
It’s about other things as well, primarily our melancholy hero’s complicated relationship with his brilliant, accomplished and disapproving father Robert Spritzel (Michael Caine), his ex-wife Noreen (Hope Davis) and his rebellious teenaged son son Mike (Nicholas Hoult) and 12 year old daughter Shelly (Gemmenne de la Peña).
But The Weather Man is fundamentally about a man who is sad and trying to find meaning and purpose in a world seemingly devoid of either. That helps explain why it was a box office flop but also why it’s a funky, offbeat delight, a rare and unique movie about people and their glorious idiosyncrasies.
In The Weather Man Cage plays a character who is more or less an exact cross between Charlie and Donald Kaufman. Like Charlie Kaufman, Adaptation’s screenwriter as well as its main character, The Weather Man’s David Spritzel, professionally known as David Spritz, the film’s protagonist is a depressed, insecure narcissist in the midst of a prolonged mid-life crisis that feels like it will never end and is defined by his occupation, in this case as a weather man for a Chicago news show.
Like Donald Kaufman, the weather man is a lightweight entertainer and intellectual lightweight who is all too cognizant of his limitations. Dave Spritz has been able to coast through life as the handsome, straight, successful son of a prominent author and public intellectual.
By his own estimation, he has a job that pays obscenely well but is exceedingly easy. As punishment from the universe for having done next to nothing to earn his professional success and good fortune he is habitually hit with fast food items thrown by disapproving strangers.
The image of Dave contending with a Wendy’s Frosty or errant burrito hurled at him in a fit of anti-celebrity rage is funny and striking but it’s also bittersweet, even melancholy.
It’s a running gag that never wears out its welcome, that only grows funnier and more insightful with repetition. Alas, our poignantly flawed protagonist has more to worry about than dodging fast food projectiles.
Dave’s androgynously handsome son is a low-level juvenile delinquent and the recipient of unwanted sexual advances from a profane guidance counselor played by Gil Bellows. His daughter is depressed, sullen and has taken up smoking.
Dave desperately wants to win back his old life by attempting to woo his ex-wife, never realizing that her boyfriend Russ (Michael Rispoli, cast gloriously and effectively against type) is the reasonable, dependable, solid partner he most assuredly is not rather than someone she’s merely biding time with.
I know that building!
Dave’s father, meanwhile, is diagnosed with Lymphoma and given only a few months to live. Dave consequently has even less time to devote to the innately doomed task of impressing his old man than he previously imagined.
In an Academy Award-worthy performance at once achingly sad and laugh out loud funny, Caine plays the dying author as a man of dignity and integrity in a tacky and degraded world. He’s such an innately serious, substantial man of substance that he cannot begin to hide his disappointment in having sired a profoundly silly, superficial man-child.
Whenever Dave is in his father’s presence he reverts back to being a scared, hapless kid with no idea how to gain the approval and validation from his father that he desperately needs yet suspects that he is unworthy of. Robert similarly snaps back into the role of a judgmental father who can’t help but further undermine and emasculate his son with an endless series of withering observations and painful truths.
Caine brings the full weight of his extraordinary career to the outsized role of an archetypal “Great Man” who is also a bit of an asshole. He’s a legend playing a legend opposite another legend.
Dave is forever pulling his father out of his lofty, highbrow world of words and ideas and into a tacky, degraded realm of camel toes, fast food, profane slang and, in an unexpectedly poignant, transcendent scene, the golden oldies of Bob Seger and the Silver Bullet Band.
Because I am human, and consequently a sucker for cheap nostalgia, I get a cheap but potent thrill from seeing scenes filmed in places I know intimately, because I’ve lived there or worked there or passed by on my way to somewhere else.
As a former Chicagoan, I consequently spent the entirety of The Weather Man recreating the gif of Leonardo DiCaprio pointing at the television from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood as I recognized one adroitly chosen Chicago location after another.
I’m not sure that I have ever seen a movie that does as good a job capturing not just the look of Chicago during the winter but the mood as well.
Cage and Caine are perfect together. The strong physical resemblance certainly does not hurt and Cage gets an invaluable assist from the hair and make-up department in the form of a hairstyle much different than any Cage had ever sported onscreen before or since.
Cage’s normie weatherman hair goes a long way towards establishing the poignantly banal nature of the character’s psyche and life.
When Travolta/Cage guest Jon Gabrus chose to be on an episode devoted to The Weather Man I was surprised because it’s a relatively obscure entry in Cage’s canon. Re-watching it for this project I realized that he chose The Weather Man because it is a legitimately great movie that benefits tremendously from multiple viewings.
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