Film Review: <em>Thank You for Smoking</em>

Thank You for Smoking is a delightfully snarky little film that takes a jaundiced eye at human nature in general and Washington politics in particular. No one in the movie is entirely honorable (to say the least!), but everyone is a delight to watch.

At the center of the story is Nick Naylor, played with dead pan panache by Aaron Eckhart. Naylor is the spokesman for Big Tobacco and is honest both to himself and to us the audience about what he does. His job is to defend an industry that kills twelve hundred people a day. Next to him, most of the great killers of world history are mere pikers.

Yet, he does his job so well that in one of the first scenes, on a TV talk show where he is outnumbered about four to one by anti tobacco guests and where the audience is about ready to get a rope and string him up, he manages to get most of the folks over to his point of view. Even the dying cancer kid guest shakes his hand.

Naylor’s arch enemy is a Senator from Vermont, the pompous, self absorbed Ortolan K. Finistirre, played by one of the great character actors of our age, William H. Macy. While the good Senator is supposed to be one of the “good guys”, he comes across as a bit of an ass.

Naylor’s other enemy, though at first he doesn’t know it at first, is the spunky and ambitious reporter Heather Holloway, played by Katie Holmes. The reason Naylor doesn’t know that Holloway is a threat is that she is rogering him silly while extracting all of his secrets for the big expose article she is writing.

Naylor comforts himself from the woes of his chosen profession with a weekly lunch with the two other “merchants of death.” They are Polly Bailey who speaks for big alcohol, played by Mario Bello, and Bobby Jay Bliss, a good old boy who spins for big firearms, played by David Koechner.

While Senator Finistirre plots to stick it to Naylor’s employers by forcing them to display a skull and crossbones on every pack of cigarettes and while Ms. Holloway plots his downfall, Naylor travels about doing the work of the devil (in the form of  Doak 'The Captain' Boykin, played by Robert Duvall.) He is accompanied by his son, Joey, played by Cameron Bright, who seems to have started a career playing forty year olds in the bodies of children. Joey seems overly fascinated and proud about what his father doesn. We can see that already Naylor is mentoring the next generation of spinmeisters.

Along the way, Naylor attempts to bribe a Marlborough Man, played by Sam Elliot, who is dying of cancer and is one of big tobaccos enemies.  Then it’s off to Hollywood to see if he can get smoking back into the movies, the better to make it seem sexy and cool.

While the film does highlight the absurdity of the characters and the situations they get into, it is never vicious. Nick Naylor is just trying to pay the mortgage the best way he knows how. “Michael Jordan plays basketball. Charles Manson kills people. I talk.” And it’s not as if he’s holding a gun to anyone’s head, forcing them to take up cigarettes. No matter how good a sultan of spin Naylor is, it is still a matter of personal choice.

Thank You for Smoking is based on the satirical novel by Christopher Buckley, the son of the famous conservative pundit William F. Buckley.  It comes highly recommended for anyone who likes their comedy sharp and witty.