No-one in Hollywood can quite do morose like Nic Cage...and here he glumly surpasses himself.

He plays Dave Spritz, a weatherman for a Chicago TV station who grimly concedes that his job pays well even if it doesn't require any qualifications. Not even meteorological ones.

Outside work, he lives in a designer apartment but hankers to return to the suburban family home where his estranged wife (Hope Davis) and kids still live.

They're a pudding of girl, who unenthusiastically attends archery classes with her despairing dad, and a troubled teenage boy whose counsellor is making gay overtures to him.

There's also Dave's dad (Michael Caine), a successful novelist whose disapproval of his son's limp (as he sees it) career trajectory is a constant sliver of ice in Dave's side.

So, it's not happy families. Even less so when about once a month an item of fast food - burrito, McDonalds apple pie or chocolate shake - will be lobbed from a car at "the weather man".

Dave is a not entirely likeable man - a melancholy self-pity fuels his all-consumingly low self-esteem and he can't seem to conduct any sort of personal relationship without souring it.

So it's difficult to empathise with him, for example, when his attempt to bond with his son takes the form of beating the hell out of his predatory counsellor.

Sideways and About Schmidt director Alexander Payne wryly draws a winning chemistry of black humour from his characters' despair but Gore Verbinski - in his first foray into drama - can't pull the same trick.

The moral appears to be that, like the weather, life's not predictable. But you would hope for a little sunshine between showers.

Tim Evans