Thank You For Smoking
Director Jason Reitman's debut feature somehow manages to make a sympathetic character out of a tobacco spokesperson...
Surprisingly, for a film whose main character works in the tobacco industry, no one lights up at all in Thank You For Smoking. As the director has put it, to have lots of people smoking in the movie would distract the audience from his intended aim: to satirise the media treatment of personal choice.
The main character, Nick Naylor
(Aaron Eckhart), justifies his job as a pro-smoking lobbyist by
underlining the freedom of personal choice that each person should
have, and that his job is to defend smokers' rights against the
ever-increasing numbers of people who want smoking banned, or at least
made the last taboo. Although this seems like a flimsy excuse for
Naylor's career choice, (that, and his need "to pay the mortgage"), his
witty lines and warm relationship with his young son (Cameron Bright)
make him much easier to like. He knows that his job "requires a
certain... moral flexbility," but, within the movie, he is certainly
not alone in this.
So, the fact that no one is ever seen to smoke in the film, and people suffering smoking-related illnesses frequently pop up, unsubtly reminding the audience that behind the humour, there lies a serious problem. Naylor knows that the annual figures for deaths from smoking-related dieseases far outweighs those of his friends in the MoD (Merchants of Death) Squad, who protect the interests of the alcohol and firearms industries. In one particular scene, Naylor proves his gift of the gab, by using the smoking death toll to beat his colleagues into quiet submission.
So how does Naylor defend his job? With increasingly difficulty, after the sexually predatory investigative reporter Heather Holloway (Katie Holmes) spills the beans on Naylor's secrets, shattering his well-maintained public facacde, and earning him the sack from Big Tobacco. This crisis of confidence is accompanied by the realisation that he is not being a great role model for his son, and Naylor begins to wonder if the demands of his mortgage really do outweigh the downsides of his job.
Reitman's film (and the source novel, by Christopher Buckley) has been accused of having a scattergun approach to the targets it satirises, and the plot can be a bit uneven, jumping from one storyline to the other, coming across a bit like a series of sketches on a related theme. Still, it's a consistently amusing take on the workings of the media, with great performances from Eckhart, Maria Bello as the pro-alcohol lobbyist ("have you heard about this fetal alcohol syndrome?) and William H. Macy as Naylor's senator nemesis, who's trying to slap poison signs onto cigarette packets to deter even "those who can't read" from taking it up.
Furthermore, no movie this year will have a line that is greater than Macy's angered response to Naylor's personal choice speech: "The great state of Vermont will not apologise for its cheese!" Too right.
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