THE WEATHER MAN

Directed by Gore Verbinski. Starring Nicolas Cage, Michael Caine, Hope Davis, Gemmenne de la Pena, Nicholas Hoult, Michael Rispoli 16 cert, gen release, 101 min

AS MIDDLE age approaches, a highly paid individual, known to millions, realises that he has spent significant years of his life accommodating the American public's inclinations towards lazy thinking. He elects to do something important.

I am talking about Gore Verbinski, director of Pirates of the Caribbean, The Mexican and The Ring, but I could be as well be describing the hero of The Weather Man. Verbinski's grim little drama - as illustrative, perhaps, of its director's mood as were those films in which Werner Herzog risked his life in the jungle to tell tales of men risking their lives in the jungle - stars Nicolas Cage as a television weather forecaster failing to cope with a broken marriage, a daughter who smokes, a father who doesn't understand him and the public's propensity to fling fast-food at him in the street. Poor, tragically rich celebrity. Our hearts bleed.

As you will have gathered, The Weather Man, which, contrary to indications, was not based on a novel by a spectacled graduate of some prestigious creative writing course, explores the same middle-class, middle-life crises that drove American Beauty and The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Both those very different projects did, however, grant their protagonist some moment of epiphany or catastrophe. By contrast, The Weather Man presses layer after layer of low-level misery upon Cage without ever allowing him (or us) the release that comes from leaving your clothes on the beach or being shot dead.

Cage's David Spritz, who works for a local Chicago station, has applied for a big-money job on national television, but it seems as if his former wife (why, exactly, do you already have Hope Davis's face in your head?) has no urge to reunite with him. As a result, the position in New York will separate him from his daughter. David's father, a high-brow writer (Michael Caine), remains puzzled by David's skewed priorities.

And that's really it. The Weather Man, reasonably well-acted, shot in pathetic-fallacy greys, meanders glumly forwards without happening upon a plot reversal or stumbling over any narrative tension. Any viewer who has ever had a real problem will be tempted to grab the picture by its supposed lapels, shake it vigorously and demand that it pull itself together. He or she may then wish to report the distributors to whichever public body enforces truthfulness on film posters. A comedy to brighten your day, the tagline shouts. Every word of that, including "a" and "to", is a lie.

Donald Clarke