Thank You For Smoking
Director: Jason Reitman
Rated: M
Screening from Thurs 17 Aug


Jason (son of Ivan) Reitman's new film is a tricksy and frequently funny satire on spin culture, big tobacco, and anti-choice moralism.

Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart) is a key official at the Academy of Tobacco Studies, a government-lobbying organisation and public spin-machine set up by tobacco companies. Nick carries out his work with consummate rhetorical ability, preying on the tiniest argumentative holes and most incidental hypocrisies of his opponents, including anti-smoking lobbyists and politicians to consistently to make them appear opportunistic. He admits his skills are not the product of vigorous study or careful development but simply his vast moral flexibility.

Nick's notoriety inflates exponentially after he cleverly out-demagogues and embarrasses several anti-tobacco lobbyists and even Senator Finistirre (William H Macy) of the cheese-producing state of Vermont in respective television appearances. Boosted by this success, and goaded by the antagonism of the Senator's plans to introduce graphic 'poison' labels to all cigarette packets, Nick proceeds with a plan to re-saturate cinema with cigarette smoking, which he and his co-campaigners lament has in recent times been reserved for 'RAVs' (Russians, Arabs, and villains).

In this enterprise he attracts the support of tobacco industry patriarch Doak Boykin (Robert Duvall) and the orient-obsessed Hollywood agent Jeff Megall (Rob Lowe). His personal 'MOD-squad' (merchants of death) of spin-masters, that includes the alcohol industry's Polly (Maria Bello) and the gun industry's Bobby (David Koechner), provide much unofficial support. But complicating things for Nick is the prying of deceitful journalist Heather Holloway (Katie Holmes) and, more significantly, the nagging need to bring up his impressionable young son Joey (Cameron Bright) in a responsible manner.

Based on a novel by Christopher Buckley, 'Thank You for Smoking' is especially effective in its almost complete avoidance of taking sides. By portraying journalists, anti-choice puritans, and opportunist politicians in as much a position of moral depletion as their counterparts, PR officials and tobacco executives, the film bypasses the potentially miring complexities of the conflict (which it probably doesn't have the credentials to adequately explore anyway) and is free to satirise mercilessly and indiscriminately.

This uninhibited flow of ridicule is sharply executed and the accompanying cynicism is actually rather bracing. The conclusion is perhaps incongruous with the rest of the film in its non-cynical promotion of some social values, but the optimism is only half-serious and in any case necessary to avoid criticisms of total, nihilistic pessimism.

The cast are the real carriers of the film though. Eckhart capably portrays Nick's tricky sway between devious, vacuous-ethicality and well-meaning parenting. Lowe is hilariously direct as the super-enthusiastic agent surrounding himself with the trappings of an eccentric but reserving none of the colour for his own personality. And Macy and Duvall are always superb. But Bello and Koechner, as Nick's MOD buddies, are the most effective points of the satire. They perfectly exaggerate and highlight the ethically-backward character of their respective industries and of PR work in general, and help incite some of Nick's most extreme and funny moments of knavishness.

William McGinley