15, 92mins
Thank you for Smoking is a clever satire about the American tobacco industry that damns the giants who pimp cigarettes, but refuses to shame the culprits. An obvious excuse is legal fees. This is Jason Reitman’s first feature. It’s a modest mainstream spoof. The film has popcorn responsibilities, and the last thing a fledgeling director needs is a fight with the tobacco lobby.
That said, Reitman is a gifted clown. His film bristles with shocking statistics and scathing cameos. But the irreverent script, taken from Christopher Buckley’s original novel, is so distractingly light and funny that you cease to care about the issues. The pompous characters who wage war over the right to smoke are so shallow and ghastly that you either laugh or despair.
The demonic hero is a super-confident spin-doctor called Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart). He makes a fortune by turning up at television studios to squash damaging media scares that threaten the tobacco industry’s fabulous profits. He is the sleazy soul of Thank You For Smoking, and you almost love him for it.
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Eckhart is quite brilliant as this Teflon whiz. It helps that he is as blond and handsome as David Beckham. It helps even more that he has the rhetorical skills to turn public witch-hunts against smoking into perceived attacks on fundamental human rights. The cynicism is so perfect it hurts.
The television cameras love Naylor almost as much as the news presenters he bribes to grill him. Senator Ortolan K. Finistirre (William H Macy), who milks the anti-smoking voters to fuel his election campaign, is a wonderfully abused punchbag.
Eckhart is such a depraved joy to watch, and so disconcertingly honest with us (the cinema audience, to which he confesses all), that it’s impossible to censure him. The bizarre result is that we begin to take as much pleasure in skewering the politically correct as Naylor does.
Heather Holloway (Katie Holmes), a sexy, febrile journalist on a Washington newspaper, puts this axiom to the test when she shamelessly stalks Naylor in order to skewer him on the front page.
There are other battles to resolve. Naylor’s young son, Joey (Cameron Bright) — essentially the nagging conscience of the film — drags the film with annoying regularity into conventional family mush by forcing his father to square his domestic life with his dodgy principles. Frankly, this is what spoils the indecent fun, and where I reluctantly part company with Reitman’s ultimately wholesome message.
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JAMES CHRISTOPHER