“Few people on the planet know what it is to be truly despised,” says Nick Naylor, who speaks with the voice of experience.
Nick is the “hero” at the center of the smart new comedy “Thank You for Smoking,” and he talks for a living. “Michael Jordan plays ball,” he explains. “Charles Manson kills people. I talk.”
Nick (Aaron Eckhart) talks on behalf of cigarettes, as the main Washington, D.C. lobbyist for big tobacco. The self-professed Colonel Sanders of nicotine, Naylor performs hour after hour of smiling, hand-shaking damage control and spin-doctoring.
“You know that guy who can pick up any girl?” Naylor boasts. “I’m him – on crack.” He’s the type of ultra-smooth operator who can turn any bad break to his advantage. When he appears on a daytime talk show seated next to a bald teenager who’s being ravaged by lung cancer, Naylor pledges millions of dollars toward cancer research and awareness campaigns in the name of big tobacco. Suddenly, the studio audience that had been cursing his name moments before is clapping and tearing up as Naylor shakes hands with his now-beaming Cancer Boy. Naylor is great at what he does, and he likes doing it.
Or does he? Divorced, with a 12-year-old son, Naylor buries the guilt he feels over peddling a product that kills 1,200 people a day. It’s that same guilt, though, that leads him lust-first into an ill-advised fling with a young Washington journalist (Katie Holmes) out for a cover story on him. Is it really wise to bed the woman who starts their first conservation by referring to Naylor as “the yuppie Mephistopheles”?
What legacy will Naylor leave his son? Naylor follows up a heroic fireman dad at his son’s show-and-tell day at school, where he proceeds to rationalize his oily profession both to himself and to a roomful of inquisitive children. Buying cigarettes, he argues, is merely a way of making one’s own choice and challenging authority, which he posits are cornerstones this great country was founded on. His son, meanwhile, sinks down in his desk and squirms with embarrassment.
Naylor means well. He’s helping his son with a history paper when the boy must answer a question about what makes the U.S. government the best in the world. Naylor guilelessly cites the country’s endless appeals system as a reason for civic pride.
Nick and his two best friends (the great Maria Bello and David Koechner) comprise the Merchants of Death, or the MOD Squad, for short. One is a lobbyist for alcohol, the other for firearms. They meet regularly in the dark corner of a club to discuss strategy, statistics and how to combat the negative spin when Diane Sawyer hugs deformed children born of alcoholic mothers.
Tobacco sales are down in the face of negative press. Cigarettes aren’t on televison anymore. The original Marlboro man is dying from lungs as black as unprocessed tar. A crusading Vermont senator (the wonderfully square William H. Macy) wants to affix a skull and crossbones to every cigarette package sold throughout America.
Naylor’s big idea is to increase sales by putting smoking back into the movies. Some of the film’s funniest moments come when Naylor makes a trip to Los Angeles to arrange a deal with a showbiz super-agent (Rob Lowe) that will have Brad Pitt and Catherine Zeta-Jones lighting up after a sex scene in a futuristic sci-fi epic.
Lowe’s agent, the man who invented product placement, is a hilarious study in corporate soullessness, pretentiousness and moral flexibility. He’s arbitrarily obsessed with Japanese culture, has a Koi pond outside his headquarters and has a giant screen in his office waiting area that shows clips of a killer whale thrashing the life out of a flailing sea lion. The agent’s assistant is even more vacuous, marveling at the office’s perfectly silent elevator and graciously offering Naylor’s son a refreshment choice between orange juice, coffee and Red Bull.
Director Jason Reitman makes an assured debut with “Smoking,” juggling dark humor with absurdity and never letting the material become too glib or sink under its own cynicism. He builds laughs around character and ideas, and he understands that an observant joke, such as the sight of John Wayne firing up a cig in an old war movie then getting mowed down by gunfire, can have equal footing with a well-played silly one, like Rob Lowe unapologetically wearing a kimono.
The film’s packaging is as slick as Naylor himself, full of tricky editing, deadpan voiceover and stylish camerawork. The photography features deep, rich colors offset by sepia, which niftily makes the whole film look a little like it’s been exposed to too much secondhand smoke.
Adapted from the novel by Christopher Buckley, “Thank You for Smoking” works because it picks satirical targets both easy and elusive. Everyone gets hit below the belt, from lobbyists to conservative witch-hunters to Hollywood to the liberal press. The film shows every possible side to the cigarette argument but withholds final judgment on the matter, excising a pat “message” in favor of simply drawing back to expose the whole mess in a funny yet pointed perspective.
Is the tobacco debate about freedom or about moral responsibility? Naylor concludes that most of the bad perpetrated in this world is done “to pay a mortgage.” Why does he ultimately do what he does for a living? “Because I’m good at it,” he says.
“Thank You for Smoking” is a rare highbrow comedy that’s accessible to mainstream audiences and doesn’t mistakenly believe it’s smarter than it actually is. It’s a spiky, feel-good movie about feeling really bad.