Whether Man

It’s refreshing. I’m refreshing. I’m fast food. This is the movement of personal revelation for Nicolas Cage’s character in THE WEATHER MAN.

“To be, or not….” While Hamlet is the archetypal whether man, Cage as Dave Spritz is a worthy latter-day Prince of Denmark. His father is dying, his ex-wife is unforgiving, his son is in rehab, and his daughter is called “camel toe” because the shape of her genitalia is vivid from her tight pants. This is a movie about a man in the fuck of a life crisis.

I’d love to be an actor; you have no agenda outside the immediate present. An actor arrives at his home and doesn’t rush inside for a pee, he doesn’t carry anything except what he’s going to use, he is not hungry except where it moves the plot, he does not drink except to have the character drunk, and even then, he is faking drunkenness so he has the luxury of only looking terrible in the morning without actually feeling it. Dave Spritz wears his great, dark car like his great, dark overcoat. He arrives at his home and has a significant argument with his ex-wife instead of feeling the stomachache over the chilidog he ate for lunch or considering the traffic he’ll have to face before dinner. He takes his time to throw a snowball at his ex-wife, and breaks her glasses in doing so. He takes his time with that.

I don’t agree with the end message, though, that nothing in adult life is easy. That can’t be right, but that’s the message our hero needs to hear. He needs to hear that so he doesn’t feel bad for himself against the tough issues he has to face. He has to do the work, he has to reconcile himself to do the work, and in order to do that, he has to chuck some self-sympathy and just get it done. Yes, sometimes adult life is like that.

What we see at the beginning of the movie is that Dave Spritz has bad aim. He needs a target. He needs practice. He needs a weapon more potent than frozen water. So he takes up archery.

While Spritz does acquire a bow to walk the streets of New York City, the film does not show any essence of levity in his adult life. I am not surprised at the absence of a WEATHERMAN 2. All work and no play would make for a very dull sequel. There is also NOT an HAMLET II. Anyone left at the end of that play was killed; even Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are executed to ensure the impossibility of a second run. Decisiveness is easy, you just have decide to do it.