The Weather Man: Critic Reviews

The Weather Man is what indie misery looks like when re-created by one of Hollywood's big studios.

This fainthearted bid at social satire stars Nicolas Cage as a middle-aged man gazing into the yawning void of his life.

This is one glum outing, with occasional pings of wry wit and hearty chuckles.

What makes this so emotionally compelling is the way Dave scrambles from this deep vale of cluelessness to something approaching moral maturity.

We get a vague movie that a few successful but chronically dissatisfied men will be able to call their own. The rest of us will see the film for what it is: a long, cold mumble from the heart.

The most supremely odd American film of the year.

What The Weather Man needed was a change in its weather -- a certain kind of humor, to be precise, something like the deadpan but human satire of Alexander Payne's About Schmidt.

I see no reason, apart from chronic yuppie passive-aggression, why Dave shouldn't get over himself and wipe that giant 'L' off his forehead.

The film has the insistent persona of an ambitious college student who desperately expects an A but must settle for a lesser letter. Nevertheless, a fine cast guarantees good moments.

Succeeds where so few Hollywood movies even venture - it builds a believable life, adds just enough nervous laughter to relieve the realistic tension, and constantly escapes the dumbed-down expectations beaten into us by lesser films.

[Verbinski] and Steven Conrad hold their ground, sticking to their conviction that Dave's story should play as a belated-coming-of-age movie.

This film has moments of uncommon observation and touching insight.

A scathing, often right-on look at the follies of contemporary culture.

A gloomy, self-serious picture.

David is pathetic, something that fans of Cage's macho adventures might have trouble accepting. But he's intriguingly pathetic, a state that raises some interesting issues.

The Weather Man has the chance to be this year's Sideways. If, that is, it's marketed right.

One of the biggest downers to emerge from a major studio in recent memory.

A vague hint at spiritual rebirth in the closing seconds does nothing to wash away the acid taste of this character, and he's all there is to the movie.

An engaging meditation on a man cursed with that midlife self-awareness.

Like the chilly winds that blow throughout it, The Weather Man is cold, grim, erratic and eventually just relentless.

Another Nicolas Cage film where the star mopes through the proceedings as if he's suffering from a bad head cold.

Dave's self-involvement is so extreme that he can't see that the bluntly human weaknesses of the people around him aren't his fault. We both pity him and want to shake him; eventually, though, we just become bored by him.

A meticulously developed character piece.

The movie blows all over the place, too, as its meandering plotlines do flesh out this portrait of a success who believes himself a failure, but never expands any further.