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 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.
To contact the author: suchandrika@gmail.com
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