Starring: Nicolas Cage, Hope Davis (I), Nicholas Hoult, Michael Caine (I)

5 out of 10 stars: Whereas American Beauty attempted to be about the quiet desperation of the American bourgeois, The Weather Man is about the grim dissatisfaction of the entertainment professional. For most people that aren't, in some regard, in show business, this movie will probably be a series of near-misses as it attempts to speak to them, and it will largely only depress them.

The film does this in the death-of-a-thousand-cuts life that David Spritz (Nicolas Cage) experiences. He is a success, professionally. A popular weatherman in Chicago, he's received a call from a national morning show, "Hello, America," and it looks like he might get the position. But personally his life is in shambles. His ex-wife (Hope Lange) has moved on and is starting to see another man while his children (including Nicolas Hoult, from About a Boy) distance themselves from him. His father (Michael Caine), Robert Spritz, a wise and beloved author, has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and he seems disappointed in his son. Most of all, David is disappointed in himself and we watch him make a bigger mess of his life than when we first joined him.

To top it all off people throw fast-food at him, a metaphor for our throw-away culture being thrown at a throw-away life (at least as our protagonist judges himself).

The Weather Man's worst sin is, that by the end of it all, we don't really care that David Spritz is the object of burgers and malts. We haven't grown to appreciate David's human foibles as our own; he's so lazy and mistrusting it's hard to. Spritz is just a schmuck who keeps landing on his feet, ever propelling himself through life, with some pretty shoddy attempts at introspection. You wouldn't throw a shake at him yourself, but you're not too judgmental of those who do. He kind of deserves it.

Director Gore Verbinski has had an enviable string of success. His Pirates of the Caribbean was a beloved film, award-honored smash, The Ring jump-started the interest in Japanese horror, and The Mexican…well, The Mexican was a bomb but I really liked it. But with The Weather Man Verbinski tackles Steve Conrad's screenplay with delicacy and undeniable talent, but he's tackled the empty suit of infotainer.

David Spritz could well be a walking metaphor for the entertainment industry itself, that vast sprawling industry of television, movies and print that preoccupies so much of society while rarely ennobling it. He smiles on cue, often against his prevailing mood. The guilt complex that suffuses the running time is one of undeservedness. Spritz knows he's a schmuck; he can see that he is in comparison with his father. He's well-off, but he's not a good person. He makes a lot of money but he can't spend it to affect anything positively. He buys his daughter a bow and arrow set when she expresses the slightest interest in archery; only to find her abandon it. He can accompany his father to the finest doctors but he can't affect the disease that is killing him. Spritz can't get a handle on life and has found that the only way that's successfully worked for him has been to float through it, bearing the snags along the way with as much as adult grace as he can muster.

It's these snags, the mundane things, that screenwriter(Wrestling Ernest Hemingway and Verbinski fixate on. While in the hospital Robert asks his son to fetch a paper for him while he awaits his results. What follows is a series of tiny whips and scorns which ends with David with a cup of coffee and without a paper (looking to his father like he bought one instead of the other when he really had to buy the coffee to get enough change…you get the drift.) But his father repeatedly tells him that he loves him and begs him to get his life together.

Whereas you could understand the crisis facing Lester Burnham in American Beauty you can't feel much for Spritz. Recent events in the world give this film even weaker footing with the zeitgeist, considering someone like Spritz would have charted the path of the recent hurricanes and then gone home feeling sorry for the slights that have just occurred to him.

Perhaps this selfishness is only too true of human nature and they've certainly nailed it to the floor, but, geesh Gore, couldn't it have been funnier?