Thank You For Smoking Review

Thank You For Smoking
Review: Jonathan McCrea
Director: Jason Reitman
Cert: TBC

‘You know that guy who can pick up any girl? I’m that guy – on crack.’ Based on Christopher Buckley’s novel, Thank You For Smoking is a cutting black comedy narrated by it’s hero – silver-tongued tobacco spokesman Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart, In the Company of Men, Erin Brokovich).
We meet Naylor as his career is starting to take off. Having successfully fended off an army of anti-smoking campaigners on a daytime talk show with some quick thinking, the head of Big Tobacco (Robert Duvall) recognises his potential. Naylor is quickly dispatched to Hollywood in a bid to get cigarettes back in product placement to rescue plummeting sales. ‘These days the only people who smoke on film are psychopaths or European’, he laments.
Naylor’s impressionable son accompanies him on the Quixotian adventure which involves an attempt to silence the disgruntled Marloboro Man, a very Californian encounter with the most powerful man in Hollywood, and an assassination attempt with a novel modus operandum: nicotine patch overdose.
Thank You for Smoking is a relentless satire of modern America, refreshingly untethered to the usual standards of political correctness. For once, it’s not just the amoral antics of demonised spin doctors and money-grabbing tobacco chiefs that get a roasting. The back-stabbing journalist (Katie Holmes), the bumbling self-righteous politician (William H Macy) and the wonderfully zen movie mogul (Rob Lowe) are all keenly parodied by charicature.
The film is rescued from sactimonious sermon by Eckhart’s ability to balance the two sides of Naylor. Somehow likeable and deplorable at the same time, he uses argument and charm as a smokescreen to justify his actions. At a show-and-tell session at his son’s school he advocates independent thought to a group of 10-year-olds: ‘All I’m saying is think for yourselves. So your mom says smoking is bad for you. Is she a medical expert? So she’s hardly a credible witness then…’.
First time director Jason Reitman does show a lack of experience in parts as he tinkers too much with gimmicky sequences, but that’s largely outweighed by great dialogue and some stellar comic performances.
In a year of earnest and worthy films on 9/11, Rwandan genocide and the despicable dealings of Walmart and Enron, the morally adrift Thank You For Smoking is a breath of fresh air.