The best parts of “Thank You for Smoking” are an invigorating game of slap-yourself-silly.
We hate tobacco, but we love the freedom to smoke it. Slap.
We deplore the marketing of fireweed to children, but we might fund their college education on the profits from the tobacco stocks in our 401(k). Slap.
Tobacco use is inherently poisonous, but as long as you admit it on the label, the government lets you sell it. Slap, slap.
Christopher Buckley’s wickedly funny novel was founded on Americans’ constitutional guarantee of cognitive dissonance. We covet the inalienable right to both hate the sin and resent the buzz-killers who want to regulate the sin.
Too bad there is far more of this delicious contradiction in the novel than in Jason Reitman’s movie version. Buckley also poured on better sex, better action, more duplicitous politicians and more of just about everything else that made Hollywood salivate over the film rights.
As a movie, “Thank You for Smoking” is curiously flat and uninvolving, coming from such a biting piece of satirical writing. It also suffers from one of the worst editing jobs in recent memory, with cameras lingering too long on confused faces after a failed joke, and entire characters rubbed out in the cutting room.
That controversy over whether Tom Cruise demanded the removal of sex scenes featuring his pregnant girlfriend, Katie Holmes? It’s impossible to tell what was cut, since she’s barely in the movie, though the role she was cast in is pivotal to the plot. Forgive Tom if he was trying to save Katie not from randy sex, but a failed movie.
It’s not Aaron Eckhart’s fault that “Smoking” can be as humorless as a legislative hearing. His boyish charm and silver tongue are pitch-perfect for Nick Naylor, our hopelessly compromised protagonist.
Naylor is the spokesman for the Tobacco Academy, that industry-funded lobby founded on the words “no direct link.” If Congress tried to put a warning label on Newton’s apple, Naylor is the kind of guy “who could disprove gravity.”
Naylor, as Eckhart says in his mystifyingly intermittent voice-over, is also smooth with the ladies, which led to a divorce and his estrangement from his equally argumentative son (Cameron Bright). “You know that guy who can pick up any girl?” Naylor muses aloud. “I’m that guy, on crack.”
But a cloud hangs over tobacco world. Naylor has to go on a talk show to confront a teenager dying of cancer. He seeks advice at his weekly lunch club with the other “merchants of death,” the spokes-celebrities for the gun and alcohol lobbies (Adam Brody and Maria Bello).
Meanwhile, Naylor’s bosses are fighting more congressional regulation from Vermont Senator Ortolan Finistirre (William H. Macy). And teen smoking is way down. At this rate of decline, how will the evil chiefs of tobacco afford their mint juleps?
Naylor decides the best way to promote smoking is to get cigarettes back into the movies. This leads to the movie’s best satire – of the movie business, featuring Rob Lowe as a Japan-obsessed talent agent who finds the flammable pure-oxygen atmosphere of space travel no obstacle to casting Brad Pitt as a chain-smoking astronaut.
For better and worse, Naylor’s relationship with his son becomes the main plot. For better, because Naylor tries to win his son over with Buckley’s observation that if you argue correctly, you’re never wrong. And arguing correctly doesn’t mean being right, it simply requires making your opponent look villainous. That’s a fair summation of public life these days.
But focusing on the son takes away the sexy badness of Buckley’s far-reaching satire. I wanted to sit longer with the merchants of death, and hear them say all those awful but true things. I wanted to see lobbyists in bed, not whining on the telephone. I wanted somebody to mention the new Colorado smoking ban, and ask if the cowboys on Brokeback Mountain must also atone for the sin of lighting up.
The book had a fearlessness that the movie version so lacks.
“Syriana” played that fearlessness with expert gloom and doom, taking on another subject – oil – for which Americans hold blazing torches of contradiction. Tobacco and our confused attitudes toward it deserve the same brave accuracy, whether in jest or joust.
Staff writer Michael Booth can be reached at 303-820-1686 or mbooth@denverpost.com.
** | “Thank You for Smoking”
R for sexual situations, profanity|1 hour, 32 minutes|SATIRE| Written and directed by Jason Reitman, from the novel by Christopher Buckley; starring Aaron Eckhart, Rob Lowe, Maria Bello, Cameron Bright and Adam Brody|Opens today at area theaters.
