![]() ![]() He often parks his car in front of the house he once shared with his wife Noreen ( Hope Davis), his overweight daughter Shelly (Gemmenne de la Pena) and his troubled son Mike ( Nicholas Hoult). This is one of those Nicolas Cage performances where he seems consumed by worry, depression, and misdirected anger. He does the weather for two hours a day with hardly any preparation and makes the occasional personal appearance we see him in costume as Abraham Lincoln. "Do you know," his father asks him, "that the harder thing to do and the right thing to do are usually the same thing?" Dave has made life easy for himself, but Robert tells him, "Easy doesn't enter into grown-up life." Dave's life does indeed seem easy. He gets the weather off the news service wires. ![]() In Robert's mind, it's not that Dave is a weatherman, but that he is a bad one. His father Robert ( Michael Caine) is a famous novelist who won the Pulitzer Prize, and who has always been disappointed in his son - disappointed, we sense, at every stage of Dave's life, and by everything that he has done. To feel inadequate is Dave Spritz's life sentence. They sense that he has embraced victimhood, and are tempted. Perhaps his broadcast viewers sense that, which is why they throw fast food at him from passing cars. David's fatal flaw (all tragic heroes have one) is that he does not value his own work. There is nothing ignoble about being a weatherman, especially in Chicago, where we need them.
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