Forget Renfield, The Weatherman is the Nicolas Cage/Nicholas Hoult Collaboration To See
Nicolas Cage cultists like myself were overjoyed when it was announced that the Academy Award-winning pop icon would join Nicholas Hoult as the star of the big-budget Dracula riff Renfield because the move helped solidify the actor’s return to the A-list and theatrically released movies following a long, dispiriting stint in the direct-to-video wilderness.
Honestly, at this point, it’s just nice to see a new Nicolas Cage movie in a theater. It’s been a while and I sorely missed the experience.
Cage super-fans were similarly overjoyed because the juicy role of Count Dracula echoes the actor’s gonzo performance in the 1988 dark comedy Vampire’s Kiss. Method actor Cage famously ate a cockroach to get into character for Vampire’s Kiss, a cult classic that in many ways marks the birth of Cage’s legend as someone not just willing but eager to go to insane extremes for his art.
Vampire’s Kiss was the introduction of Cage not just as an unusually charismatic and intense young thespian but as a goddamn icon, a cult hero for the ages. This was the beginning of Cage the proto-meme, no small feat considering how famously bonkers he was in Peggy Sue Got Married and Moonstruck.
Cage devotees were lastly excited by Cage’s casting opposite Nicholas Hoult as the title character because Renfield reunites two of the stars of one of Cage’s most underrated, overlooked and just plain best films, the 2004 dramatic comedy The Weather Man.
When Jon Gabrus chose The Weather Man for his guest appearance on Travolta/Cage I was surprised because I remembered the film being winning, charming and funny but also terribly slight. Re-watching it for Travolta/Cage and later for a Fatherly piece they ended up not running (that would be this bad boy) I understood exactly why Gabrus chose it. It’s fucking great, a low-key masterpiece that has taken up valuable real estate in my fractured psyche. It is a real cult film and I am a die-hard member of its cult.
With The Weather Man, Gore Verbinski, the big-money director behind the Pirates of the Caribbean series and Nicolas Cage, the dashing hero of the National Treasure franchise, decidedly to make something small, personal and defiantly, even perversely non-commercial: a very human movie about the deceptively complicated inner life of a depressed Midwesterner in the grips of an intense mid-life crisis.
The response at the time was less than rapturous. The delicate comedy-drama received mixed reviews and under-performed at the box office but in the ensuing decades the film has attracted a sizable, devoted cult tuned into its unique, tricky frequency.
The Weather Man brilliantly casts heavyweight thespian Cage as lightweight television bozo David Spritz, a weatherman in Chicago whose charmed life as the handsome, successful, glibly charming son of Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and Great Man of Letters Robert Spritzel (Michael Caine) has run into serious turbulence.
The callow TV professional desperately wants to get back together with his long-suffering ex-wife Noreen (Hope Davis) and reunite his family despite her clear-cut disinterest in him and serious boyfriend.
From the outside, our deeply, wonderfully, all too relatable flawed protagonist is the very image of success. He’s rich, good-looking and paid way too much for a job he is the first to concede is so easy that it fills him with shame and inspires the public to hurl various fast food items at him in public.
Throughout The Weather Man people chuck Big Gulps and Chicken McNuggets and other low-quality fast food items at our hero in a strange ritual of public humiliation that’s funny but also unexpectedly sad, just like the film itself.
Dave is rich and on television, the two goals of every red-blooded American male, yet he nevertheless feels like he’s failing in every facet of his life. He doesn’t know how to connect with an overweight, depressed daughter Shelly (Gemmenne de la Peña) or a son(Hoult), whose youthful beauty attracts the attention of a creepy counselor played by Life on the Line’s Gil Bellows whose interest in him is clearly sexual in nature.
The facile entertainer is desperate to impress an impossibly imposing, intimidating father who he never stops disappointing in big and small ways. On a micro and a macro level Dave can never live up to his father’s outsized legend. He disappoints his father through his choice of profession and the unbearable lightness of his being but also by failing to successfully execute small errands for him.
Caine is magnificent as a man of ideas and substance who is too dignified and mature for our degraded world. Cage is just as good as a lightweight who is every bit as silly and superficial as a realm so devoid of substance that it elevates an overgrown child like him to great heights of wealth and fame.
Watching Caine’s somber intellectual struggle to comprehend like the vulgar likes of camel toes, Frosties, Big Gulps and other detritus of banal American life never stops being funny.
The Weather Man chronicles, with great humor and insight, Cage’s poignantly pathetic wannabe as he scrambles desperately to clean up the mess he has made of his personal and professional life and score a dream gig as a national weatherman with a million dollar salary.
Verbinski’s hilarious and humane character study of a shallow man without much in the way character feels like a New Hollywood movie from 1973 dropped inexplicably but gloriously into the middle of the oughts.
The Weather Man is an eminently quotable, re-watchable collection of beautifully observed moments that collectively add up to more than the sum of their parts.
The Weather Man is a little movie that also happens to be a great film.
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