|
|
The best independent film comedies of late have been subtle movies about relationships, more filled with naturalistically rendered life lessons than with the big laughs that come from exaggeration and political satire.
Sideways and The Squid and the Whale stand out as such. They’re great movies, true, but it’s good to get something like Thank You for Smoking for a change of pace. It’s in the tradition of Wag the Dog or Election — not so concerned with the literal realism of its characters’ environment as with what they have to say about the crazy world that exists outside the movie theater’s walls. The crazy world of the cigarette industry and American political lobbying, in particular.
Thank You for Smoking, directed by Jason Reitman (son of Ghost Busters director Ivan) from the novel by Christopher Buckley, caustically and broadly satirizes Washington lobbyists and the cigarette industry, with a few choice digs at journalists, Congress and Hollywood thrown in. It’s magnificently timed — just as the Jack Abramoff scandal is in the news.
Cigarettes are a perfect subject for satire, since it’s mind-boggling that something that kills people when used as intended can be legal. It’s even more incredible that people earn their living selling and promoting them.
That’s the kind of hypocrisy that usually elicits outrage and anger from anti-smoking advocates.
But Thank You for Smoking isn’t agitprop for the antis. It surgically removes the anger and replaces it with humor. It even makes its cigarette lobbyist, dare I say it, likeable.
It’s critical to have an actor who is empathetic with his cigarette-lobbyist character as well as being funny — someone like American Beauty‘s Kevin Spacey or Wag the Dog‘s Dustin Hoffman.
Fortunately, Reitman’s debut feature has found that actor in the underrated Aaron Eckhart, who plays Nick Naylor. (The very name sounds, fittingly, like a film-noir hit man.) Excellent in In the Company of Men and Erin Brockovich, the sandy-haired Eckhart has boyish looks and exudes trustfulness with his sweet, engaging smile and sincere gaze. But he can also turn that smile into a sneer instantaneously or use it to trick someone foolish enough to trust him too much or, paradoxically, doubt him. In short, he can be devilish — perfect for the part.
Thank You starts with Eckhart’s Nick, representing the Academy of Tobacco Studies, on a Joan Lunden television show seated next to a teenage boy with cancer. Nick manages to turn the audience around with that great smile and his ability to double-talk his way out of anything.
Why would the cigarette industry want to kill a boy like that, he asks. It’s in the industry’s best interest to keep him alive and keep him a customer. That’s what America is all about, he says. The audience, at first dumbfounded, is won over by this charming man.
Even his son (Cameron Bright) is begrudgingly respectful of him, although mortified when Nick confronts a girl in his class who dares to say her mother told her smoking is bad. Nick also delivers the film’s best line — and maybe the best line we’ll hear in a comedy this year — to his son when the boy asks him what’s so great about America. “Our endless appeals system,” Nick answers.
The film surrounds Nick with all sorts of adult characters with special interests. There’s a pompous anti-smoking senator played by William H. Macy and an embittered ex-Marlboro man brilliantly rendered by Sam Elliott in the most complex and thought-provoking role in the movie.
Thank You for Smoking‘s greatest invention is the Merchants of Death (or MOD) Squad, a Greek chorus of mortality that meets weekly at a D.C. restaurant to gloat over their latest victories. Nick trades black-humored barbs with the alcohol industry’s Polly Bailey (the mordant Maria Bello) and the gun lobby’s Bobby Jay Bliss (David Koechner).
In a scheme to get Hollywood to put more cigarettes into movies, like it used to, Nick meets a Zen-calm agent (Rob Lowe) whose complete amorality is expressed with such blissfulness that he seems like an alien. To get money for his project, Nick consults with The Chairman (Robert Duvall), a good-old-boy tobacco baron whose health is far less important to him than his wealth and power. (Alas, there’s no equivalent in this film to the hilarious character played by Gene Hackman in 2001’s Heartbreakers — a tobacco tycoon smoking himself to death to the delight of a gold-digger who wants his money.)
Thank You for Smoking has garnered much pre-release publicity for a sex scene between Eckhart’s Nick and a duplicitous investigative journalist played by cuter-than-heaven-should-allow Katie Holmes. It mysteriously disappeared between the film’s screenings at the Toronto and Sundance film festivals, and some wondered if Tom Cruise had intervened.
But it was just a projectionist’s mistake, it turned out. The scene is here, played for laughs more than eroticism.
Holmes’ character, Heather Holloway, is the least successful element in the film. While all the others commit actions that seem consistent — if an absurdist stretch — with their positions in life, Heather’s activities aren’t like any successful investigative journalist’s. Here, Reitman (and Buckley before him) make the mistake of using the character solely to move plot, rather than as satiric material. It’s a letdown, given everyone else in the film.
Ultimately, Eckhart’s Nick comes off as a loveable, seductive rascal. Maybe that’s wrong at some ethical level — a more bitter satire might end with him getting the electric chair. But it’s perfect for an actor like Eckhart, who uses this witty movie to transform himself into a star. Grade: B+
This article appears in Apr 5-11, 2006.
