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Jason Reitman's Thank You For Smoking

by The Bridge
04/18/2006

Jason Reitman's Thank You For Smoking is a lot like its main character: overly glib, hard to trust, and nearly impossible to dislike. Based on Christopher Buckley's '94 novel of the same name, Thank You covers some volatile ground, chronicling the various public scrapes and snafus of one Nick Naylor, chief spokesman for the fictitious Academy of Tobacco Studies, a think tank funded by Big Tobacco that specializes in turning out research that fails to link smoking to lung cancer and the like. Naylor (Aaron Eckhart) is a smooth talkin' sunnuvagun - or, in his words, "...that guy who can pick up any girl... on crack." A self-confessed spin doctor of the highest order, Naylor makes no bones about the duplicitous nature of his vocation in his semi-frequent voice-over narrations of passages that are lifted pretty much directly from the book.

As book-to-movie translations go, this one is unerringly faithful to the tone of the book, and a good bit of the plot, which is both a good and bad thing. The voice over gambit, for one, is usually a real bloodsucker of a cinematic device, inevitably draining the momentum from almost any film. It works better than it should here, primarily because Naylor's glib gift of gab is well-suited to the purpose of leading an audience about by its nose. Still, it is occasionally jarring, particularly when Reitman tosses it in in the form of brief freeze frames to underscore an already belaboured point. A good ferrinstance would be the congressional hearing scene, wherein William H. Macy's hilarious turn as "tough on tobacco" Vermont Senator Ortolan K. Finistirre is interuppted by Naylor's redunadant observation that Finistirre is publically flogging him. Well, duh - I'm not high.

For the most part, though, the wry spirit of Buckley's satire is well-preserved, and the cast does an admirable job of bringing a complex roster of characters to life. Robert Duvall plays Doak "the Captain" Boykin, Big Tobacco's equivalent of the Godfather, as a no-shit, gritty good ol' boy who takes his bartending tips from Fidel Castro, and it's a perfect fit. Ditto the casting of J.K Simmons as B. R. Rohrabacher (Naylor's ruthless boss and an obvious parody of real life mogul J.R. Reynolds), and, of course, Sam Elliot as Lorne Lutch, the original Marlboro Man, who is now dying of cancer and must be sent some hush money. (In the book, he was the original Tumbleweed Man - I guess product placement works in mysterious ways - that, or Fox Searchlight Pictures ain't afraid of no Cowboy Killer lawyers.) Elliot's scene is one of the movie's best, showing us both the human side of Naylor (a soft-hearted guy who aches for tobacco's forgotten victims) and the businessman operating at peak form (a master manipulator who manages to make Lutch think it was his idea to take the money and shut up, without bargaining away his pride).

The main point of this story seems to be that everyone's got an agenda. Finistirre, who oughta be the hero, is an unlikeable blowhard, clearly gunning at Big Tobacco purely for the politcal leverage it affords him. Hollywood gets a lovely skewering courtesy of Rob Lowe's superagent Jeff Megall - Lowe is to cameo sleazeballs, these days, what Elliot is to walk-on cowboys. He pitches an all-too-believable product placement for cigarettes featuring Brad Pitt and Catherine Zeta-Jones lighting up in space-hot sex! smoke rings! and you can launch a new cigarette to coincide with the movie! - with a reptilian ease and confidence that he's just too damned good at. There is also the priceless image of Lowe chatting on a hands-free headset to Tokyo in full kimono regalia and a perfectly straight face, the epitome of yuppie multi-culturalism. (His assistant, the wonderfully toady-ish Jack Brody, remarks upon introducing Naylor into Megall's Oriental-artifact filled office, "As you can see, Jeff just really digs Asian shit.") The press's carniverous M.O. is represented by Katie Holmes in a shockingly not-bad performance, although all she's asked to do is play a scheming victim who fucks her way into a scathing, inside-scoop piece on Naylor and the Academy's nefarious double talk.

So, in a flick filled with folks of such "moral flexiblility," as Naylor put it, what, or whom, is to like? Well, there's the fast flying, witty dialogue, which manages to stay crisp despite a couple of sitcom-ish scenes. Naylor's son [Cameron Bright] using dear ol' dad's arguementation technique to guilt Mom into letting him accompany Naylor to L.A., is just a bit trite. And there's the son himself, who seems to be, if not Naylor's raison d'etre, at least tied for first with the job. But, surprisingly enough, Naylor himself comes off as the film's most likeable character, despite the fact that even hard drinking alcohol lobbyist Polly Bailey (Maria Bello) and a yee-haw gun advocate (David Koechner) are too much fun to hate.

Eckhart manages to nail Naylor's charisma, his intelligence, and his knack for reconciling the conflicting interests of his diametrically opposed desires (to be a good guy and father, and to spin white til it's black) without ever resorting to overdone acting or spelling it out. And the movie, by and large, follows suit. It's interesting to note that no one is ever seen smoking in the film (well, Duvall does grip a cigar and wave it about for about ten seconds). But Naylor is, plot point, a smoker, and Reitman doesn't dwell on the diminished state of Cancer Boy (opening scene, talk show) or the diseased cowboy. This is not a movie about whether or not smoking is bad for you, as just about everyone in the movie points out, that's a foregone conclusion. It's about the sake of the argument, and America's love of both a good fight and a happy ending, even when we know it's a fairy tale.

Since there are already a few spoilers in here, I won't mention the topic of the last scene, other than to say this: when I saw this movie, the theater was full of folks laughing away, right up until the final scene's zinger, which brought about dead silence, and put quite a fine point on the whole public-health, consumer interest issue. Go see it, and don't forget that certain things are no longer allowed in theaters.