Thank You For Smoking
Director: Jason Reitman
With: Aaron Eckhart, Maria Bello
Runtime: 92 min
“You know the guy who can pick up any girl? I’m him, on crack.” Nick Naylor is a tobacco lobbyist in Washington and, as his words indicate, a shameless promoter of his own humble person as well as of the little glowy death-sticks which, he graciously informs us, kill twelve hundred people a day nation-wide. Although there’s no conclusive evidence for that, mind you.
Nick talks for a living – in the glorious acting of Aaron Eckhart, he is a player aglow in the limelight, a movie star day in, day out, befuddlling the naysaying masses with his flawless rhetoric and rugged features. That is until a sexy journalist (Katie Holmes) seduces him and then publicly reports on his candid pillow talk, causing his boss (J.K. Simmons) to drop him like the hot potato he is.
Writer/director Jason Reitman deftly avoids a Jerry Maguire dynamic, however, and that alone deserves praise; instead, Nick takes a triumphant last stand in front of cheese-eating, liquor-bottle-collecting, wearing-sandals-over-socks Vermont senator Finistirre’s (William H. Macy) congressional hearing and makes asses of a lot of people who hardly deserve it more than he does. But, as he tells his avid learner of a nine-year-old son, “if you argue correctly, you’re never wrong.”
Reitman, however, seems reluctant to argue at all, perhaps due to the power wielded by those who he is satirising. The result is that the consequences of smoking, in the persons of Cancer Boy (Nick’s chat show co-interviewee in the opening scene) and the ex-Marlboro Man (Sam Elliott) dying of lung cancer, come across as sterile and harmless whereas the allure of tobacco is perfectly captured in the beautiful opening credits, where the names of the players are seen printed on old cigarette packet designs. And not one cigarette is actually seen smoked in the film.
Thank You… is thoroughly immersed in the spirit of bullshit (in one hilarious scene we are even treated to the hitherto unacknowledged danger posed by Nicotine patches) and sometimes it’s hard to tell whether this spin is reviled or relished; the apogee of this is Nick’s crisp and ludicrous exchanges with a Hollywood talent agent, played by Rob Lowe as Phil Ken Sebben’s reclusive cousin. Together, they would return cinema to the Golden Age where smoking was sex via images like Brad Pitt and Catherine Zeta-Jones sharing a post-coital cigarette aboard a spaceship in a sci-fi movie. “But wouldn’t they blow up, though, in an all-oxygen environment?” Nick asks. “Probably…”
The upshot of all this is that the dreams and symbols we all like to hide behind are controlled and pushed at us by a bunch of hilarious freaks - an idea which, golly me, seems a lot easier to live with than that of evil masterminds plotting our doom.
Reviewed by
Paul Becker
