Pictured Claire Danes and Jason Schwartzman in Touchstone Pictures' Shopgirl. Gemmenne de la Pena and Nicholas Cage in The Weather Man.
Nicolas Cage is an actor that you can't count on. His performances are wildly inconsistent—either loaded with his signature tics ( Snake Eyes and Adaptation come to mind ) , beautifully nuanced ( Leaving Las Vegas and It Could Happen to You ) , or so out of left field they're mesmerizing ( Moonstruck, When Peggy Sue Got Married, Wild at Heart, Vampire's Kiss ) . The latter category contains his most interesting work. When Cage shoots for the moon and reaches it his joy is infectious. His derring-do in these roles is the ultimate actor's feat and it's in those early performances that he made his biggest connection with me.
But audiences seem to love Cage best in big-budget action flicks or as an Everyman In Crisis and the actor plays another one in The Weather Man. David Spritz, Cage's character, is in the midst of a midlife meltdown. Spritz is a huge success on the outside ( he's a Chicago TV weatherman being eyed for a national slot by the network ) , but an emotional flop on the inside ( he can't seem to please his difficult father or connect with his kids or estranged wife ) . Like Meryl Streep's character in Postcards from the Edge, he can't feel his life anymore.
As we watch the character going through his daily life trying to control everything ( his mantra is 'I can fix this' ) we recognize that he's bound to repeat the same mistakes. Many of his attempts to connect with those around him—trying to interest his pudgy pre-teen daughter in archery or attempting to curry favor with his father with the news about the potential job, for example—feel exactly right. Credit for that goes first to Steve Conrad's by-the-numbers script ( I actually mean that as a compliment ) , and second to Cage, who knows a lot about playing midlife crisis after many similar film parts.
We know going in—having seen a lot of these movies before ( Irwin Kirshner's 1970 Loving is one of my favorites ) —that Spritz is going to come out OK in the end. Whether he will finally please Michael Caine as his judgmental father, Hope Davis as his estranged, prickly wife or his kids, let alone himself, is another matter that these movies exist to address. Caine and Davis spar beautifully with Cage, who seems to just take it as his due.
'Easy doesn't enter into grown-up life,' Caine, as the father, tells Cage at one point, also pointing out that control is an illusion, and I wish the movie had left it at that. But like a lot of these life-lesson pictures, The Weather Man is so weighted with metaphor that it seems almost top heavy. We're shown the symbolism right from the get go—the film opens with a shot of Lake Michigan iced over and we know that it's going to be chilly going for these characters ( and for us ) . The worst example of the metaphor overkill is that often when Spritz is recognized, people, apparently angry about his lousy forecasting, toss fast food items at him, visually showing us repeatedly the random chaos and mess of life and his inability to control it.
Even though the metaphor stuff wore me down, each new scene of another off-beat Chicago location ( director Gore Verbinski's camera roams all over the city ) kept my enthusiasm high and eventually eclipsed my interest in the plot. In one scene Cage and Caine actually drove past the Loop screening room where I was watching the movie. I had my own little catharsis at that point, but after my mind wandered for a bit I decided I'd better check back in with the plot to see how it was going. It was right where I thought it would be—the sun was coming out, the ice was melting and Cage was finding emotional fulfillment—right on schedule.
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Steve Martin wants his comedy to be taken seriously and to make sure of that he produced, wrote and stars in Shopgirl, which is based on his short novel. Shopgirl is about 2,000 miles from The Jerk and the stand-up comic who felt himself possessed by happy feet and had a novelty hit record with 'King Tut.' Martin is now the most erudite of comedians and quite the sophisticate. His comedy of today inspires a polite chuckle rather than yesteryear's guffaw, but your appreciation of his work will depend on changing rather than lowering expectations.
I don't think that the Martin of Shopgirl and L.A. Story is any less talented or interesting than the Martin of Pennies from Heaven and All of Me. But I must confess a predilection for the inspired zany physical comedy of the earlier work as opposed to the careful, studied word, constructed comedy behind the latter. Martin closely mimics Woody Allen in this regard. Surely there's nothing more hilarious than parts of Allen's slapstick Bananas and Sleeper, and yet I can't resist the comic patter of Bullets Over Broadway and Manhattan Murder Mystery either.
No surprise then that Shopgirl is a story that Allen would love: Mirabelle ( Claire Danes ) , a young sales clerk who sells fancy schmancy gloves, must decide between Jeremy, the young, messy, not so successful but artistic Jew ( Jason Schwartzman ) , or Ray, the middle-aged, antiseptic WASP with fabulous wealth ( Martin ) . This intermittently interesting story has good performances by its principals and two strokes of brilliance by Martin the screenwriter—one is the manner in which his character first asks out Mirabelle and the second is a revelation about her character that serves to deepen the film and gives it the much needed weight the off-putting Philip Glass-like score keeps telling us it already has. I won't reveal either as there's not much else to be savored in this feather-light movie except perhaps the tantalizing idea of re-imagining the whole thing with a shopboy instead of a shopgirl as the central character ( and Danes teenage boy physicality makes that easygoing ) . Have as much fun with that fantasy as I did.
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Local Screening of Note: In honor of its 50th anniversary, one of my favorite films of all time, the alternately terrifying, heartwarming, eerily beautiful The Night of the Hunter from 1955, will play a one week engagement at the Music Box Theatre. An experience not to be missed.
See www.musicboxtheatre.com .
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Film Fest Reminder: Reeling 2005: the 24th Gay and Lesbian film festival kicks off next Thursday. Tickets go on sale this Friday, Oct. 28. See my separate article on some of the fest's opening week's highlights in this issue.
See www.reelingfilmfestival.org .
