'The Weather Man' brings gloomy outlook to screen

The movie is a downer, about man who's angry and resentful.
By DAVID GERMAIN
AP MOVIE WRITER
A day without sunshine is like Nicolas Cage's strange, sullen movie "The Weather Man," an exercise in cheerlessness and discontent that offers up the world's most self-absorbed whiner and expects you to like him.
Here's a guy who makes $240,000 a year for what he acknowledges is the easiest of jobs, smirking and reading weather forecasts off the prompter for a Chicago TV station.
He supplements his income with fees from equally effortless personal appearances, which present him with other perks, such as easy sex with women who view the local weather guy as a celebrity.
He has a support system of people willing to truly care for him, if only he'd let them.
And he's a front-runner for a national gig that would pay him more than a million bucks a year.
Yet all this chump does is groan and moan about how hard his life is and how nothing goes his way.
This is no everyman the rest of us can relate to. This is a pampered weasel so bizarrely preoccupied with his own mostly imagined travails that you'll likely react with indignation rather than sympathy over his sighing and sobbing.
Cage clearly saw something more to the character and plays him with earnest, though it ends up a largely two-dimensional labor of gloom and anguish.
One saving grace
What salvages "The Weather Man" from time to time is the grand presence of Michael Caine as Cage's father, whose own real drama is so engrossing and heartfelt, you wish he were the main man and his son the supporting player.
Cage's David Spritz is a master at grinning and spinning the weather, yet he's constantly buffeted by turbulence in his personal life. He's unhappy over his divorce and pressures his ex-wife (Hope Davis) to get back together even though she's involved with another man (Michael Rispoli).
David has troubles with the kids, his teen son (Nicholas Hoult), who's a recovering substance abuser, and his chubby, disconsolate daughter (Gemmenne de la Pena).
Always feeling inferior to his father (Caine), a Pulitzer Prize-winning scholar who was a buddy to world leaders in his day, David now must cope with his father's terminal cancer.
So yes, David does have real problems. Yet other than his father's illness, the domestic issues in his life feel almost certainly David's own fault.
What little backstory director Gore Verbinski and screenwriter Steven Conrad offer on the failed marriage makes it pretty clear David was the screw-up in that relationship. And his perpetual bummed-out, woe-is-me egotism easily could explain why his kids are a mess. After his wily blockbuster "Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl," Verbinski chose a real downer as a follow-up.
David spends most of the movie lashing out with impatience, anger and resentment over distractions as small as a friendly viewer asking for his autograph in line at the motor-vehicles office. His father is a truly caring figure whose puzzlement over his son's lack of initiative is viewed as disapproval by David. Again, Caine's moments are tender and moving, and he becomes a more sympathetic character as the movie progresses, while David just remains a jerk.
If the filmmakers are trying to convey the message that no matter how great your material success, you still can be an unhappy SOB, fine, they've achieved their goal.