Like American Beauty and Falling Down before it, Gore Verbinski’s The Weather Man is about mid-life suburban angst—that peculiar feeling that makes most men “lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them”. However, unlike the angry Schumacher and the sarcastic Mendes, Verbinski tackles the subject in a more peaceful, deadpan way. Although the application isn’t always successful, and there’s indie-like forced quirkiness and ample navel-gazing, the end result is still a film worth watching and thinking about.
As one reviewer rightly put it: The Weather Man is the most pessimistic film to come out of Hollywood in a long time. While that doesn’t make it good or bad, it does make it unique. After all, it’s not every day that a mainstream film fails to rah-rah-rah, refuses to tell its audience they can do anything they set their minds to, and claims that some obstacles simply cannot be overcome—however pretty you are. In The Weather Man, cancer kills in its steady way, fat girls continue to get teased, and sometimes the best way to resolve a problem is to punch the other guy in the face. For all his not-so-sly comedy, Verbinski has crafted a dour, intensely cold film whose mission is to convince you that strong people aren’t those who prevail and flourish, but those who accept and adapt.The Weather Man is an ode to resignation.
What makes the The Weather Man even more fascinating is that it’s not an independent film; it’s a big studio picture made by the director of Pirates of Caribbean, and that places it on an interesting intersection of pop art and commerce. This incongruous marriage of apparent-opposites results in something like a book written in two languages at once. It’s Sergei Eisenstein’s long lost adaptation of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead.
The most jarring and amusing problem that arises is product placement. More than any other recent Hollywood film I’ve seen, The Weather Man is so obviously also a commercial that I don’t know whether to criticize it for whoring itself out or to praise it for making the unavoidable so visible that it becomes invisible. Fast food chains, car manufacturers, Bryant Gumbel (and who knows what and who else) all want you to see this film. But, at the same time, the film wants you to see all these things and people. When a piece of half-eaten food smacks main character David Spritz in the face, Verbinski and screenwriter Steve Conrad make sure you know the exact make and model of that piece of food: “It was a McDonald’s hot apple pie,” narrates Spritz in voice-over.
Perhaps it’s not only normal, but right that if McDonald’s pays for a film, then McDonald’s gets to be in the film—not hidden, not visible, but actually fore fronted. We afford that privilege to the films of the great Soviet directors, after all: films that are soaked in communist ideology. We see Battleship Potemkin or Mother and disregard or dismiss their propaganda without disregarding or dismissing their excellence and innovation. “They couldn’t have been made,” we tell ourselves, “if they weren’t as openly ideologically informed as they are,” or we say, “these filmmakers believed in what they were preaching,” or we just don’t care why Battleship Potemkin has a collective hero or why all the villains in Mother are bourgeoisie stereotypes. I may not agree what you say, but I defend to the death your right to film and edit a sequence that celebrates it!
And what is product placement if not the manifestation of just another ideology: capitalism. In the state-sponsored film production of the Soviet Union, a film had to reinforce an ideology in order to get made; and if we accept that then can we have any honest reservations about accepting an immaculately placed Coca Cola can in some future film paid for by Coca Cola? Could we even complain about a film whose climax is a pro-Coca Cola march through Times Square put down by ruthless Pepsi-funded storm troopers?
I think the trick is in identifying the ideology-promoting techniques that snake their way into films, and watching through the commercial rather than at it. In many cases there will be nothing to see, but in the rarer cases there’ll be a worth-it reward: a filmmaker so good that he or she transcends content (a Leni Riefenstahl) or one who works within the existing restrictions and rules and makes something more than a series of advertisements: commercial art. If we only accept and adapt as viewers…
The best character in The Weather Man is Robert Spritzel, played by Michael Caine. Dying from cancer, Robert is the character with the biggest problem and the best lines. He is also the character who whines the least, in a way that mocks his son Dave’s comparatively inconsequential work and family troubles. In the film, Robert is the wise man figure because he accepts the film’s central theme: activity brings failure and pain while passivity brings contentedness—don’t try to change the situation to fit yourself; try to change yourself to fit the situation. In a quietly brilliant scene, Robert communicates his disdain for a contemporary obsession with active, doing, -ing words.
“Mike said he tried to suck him off. What is this sucking and chucking rocks about? What is this sucking and chucking and sucking of fucking? What is this shit?”
As The Weather Man wraps up, Dave learns that he has to accept and embrace his failures if he doesn’t want to be a mope all his life. It’s perhaps not as satisfying an ending as Lester Burnham’s destruction in American Beauty or whatever bombastic set-piece happens to Michael Douglas in Falling Down, but there’s a smoky clarity to this film. In his rhythmic, determined, mixed-up way, I think Verbinski is telling us:
You always become the least of your dreams.
Pacze Moj
© Cinephile Magazine, 2006