Thank You for Smoking Review
by Mark R. Leeper (mleeper AT optonline DOT net)June 5th, 2006
THANK YOU FOR SMOKING
(a film review by Mark R. Leeper)
CAPSULE: THANK YOU FOR SMOKING is really better as an essay on the gentle art of spin and of argument than it is as a story. Written and directed by Jason Reitman, this is a comedy about Big Tobacco's greatest public relations spin-doctor. And the arguments are well enough put that the viewer may well find himself siding with the nefarious Nick Naylor. The plot is rudimentary, but the film is still an education.
Rating: high +1 (-4 to +4) or 6/10
The phrase "Thank you for smoking" has a special meaning for me. Years ago when communications workers went on strike I was ordered to go to North Carolina to fill in for striking workers. I did not know it until I got there, but I had been assigned to work inside the offices and factory of the R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. As far as I was concerned that was inside "the belly of the beast." I was strongly anti-tobacco. I worked with a charming young executive, very much a gentleman, who over breakfast one day confided in me that his wife worked at a birth control center and that he hoped I would not find that too immoral. I did not have the heart to tell him that to me being a Northeast liberal it is tobacco and not birth control that seems immoral. Just being in the R. J. Reynolds building is an education in itself. That was where I first saw Joe Camel, years before he was on billboards. But many executives around the building had signs on their desks reading, "Thank you for smoking."
In the film's world as well as in the real world the big tobacco companies compete with each other, but they all agree on the cause of protecting the tobacco industry. So they fund the Tobacco Institute, in this film called the Academy of Tobacco Studies. The institute and tobacco get a lot of bad publicity and they have a public relations top gun, a superb spin-doctor in the form of Nick Naylor (played by Aaron Eckhart).
Watching THANK YOU FOR SMOKING and seeing Naylor do his thing in an odd way is like watching a Jackie Chan film. Neither film has a very good story. That is not what you see either film for. You see it to watch someone who is a consummate craftsman at getting himself (and in this case the tobacco industry) out of tight situations. Chan uses physical ability and Naylor uses superb rhetorical skills. He can stand in front of a hostile audience and with a few carefully chosen observations he can have them eating out of his hand. And what is fascinating is that even the anti-tobacco viewer is seduced by his logic. Even though, as he admits when he is together with other lobbyists he admits that the tobacco industry has a huge daily death toll, his arguments in favor of the industry are still inviting. We are just fascinated to see him use his ability.
The plot taken from Christopher Buckley's novel and adapted by director Reitman is not the main attraction. It concerns in part how in spite of the bad publicity he gets he still can win the love and admiration of his formerly skeptical son. We see how Naylor dispatches several threats to the tobacco industry. A former Marlboro Man (Sam Elliot) is dying of cancer and wants to initiate an anti-tobacco campaign. Katie Holmes plays an insidious reporter who is trying to entrap Naylor himself. Then there is a plot of a crusading congressman from Vermont, Senator Ortolan K. Finistirre (William H. Macy) who is gunning for Naylor and Big Tobacco. The film revels in nasty characterizations of all concerned, not just Naylor. Naylor is adroit and dispatches each of these threats with aplomb. And while doing all this he redeems himself in the eyes of his son.
Naylor is a sort of amoral anti-hero for a new age. His arguments are as cool and beguiling as those of Orson Welles in THE THIRD MAN. How can he look at himself in a mirror at the end of the day after contributing to the death and illness of thousands? He uses what he calls "the yuppie Nuremberg defense": Everybody's got a mortgage to pay. He gets his self-respect by doing well at job, not by doing good.
This is not a highly polished film. The cinematography is adequate, but little more. Besides having many familiar faces in the cast there does not seem to be much budget behind the film. But the film's attraction is in the writing and in its nuts and bolts demonstration of the spin profession. I can think of few better classes in how to deceive and mislead. I rate THANK YOU FOR SMOKING a high +1 on the -4 to +4 scale or 6/10.
Mark R. Leeper
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Copyright 2006 Mark R. Leeper
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