Thank You for Smoking

I read Christopher Buckley’s novel from which this movie came and though the film isn’t bad the book was better. Probably Aaron Eckhart, who plays Nick Naylor, the lead, is just a tad too bright and shiny compared to my mental illustration formed while reading.

Thank You for Smoking is, as most of Buckley’s tales, very dark humor. Naylor is the vice president of marketing for the Academy of Tobacco Studies; in other words, he’s the chief lobbyist and spokesperson for Big Tobacco. But Nick is still human and is desperate to have a solid post-divorce relationship with his nine or ten year old son (the step-dad, of course, is a doctor who harps on Naylor everytime he brings the boy back).

Senator Finisterre (D, VT), played by Bill Macy, has decided the time has come to drive another very big nail into the tobacco business: require a large skull and cross bones to be printed on the front of every pack of cigarettes. He even gets the spokesperson for a Latino group to claim the current English-only warnings are racist.

Naylor and his bosses (Robert Duvall, JK Simmons) can’t let this law get passed and so we get to see Nick pull out all his rhetorical tricks. This guy is the captain of the best debate team in the state crossed with the hunkiest star in the drama club, meaning he can usually get what he wants.

There are two obstacles this time: reporter Heather Holloway (Katie Holmes) is writing an article about Nick and some radical anti-smokers kidnap him. Being somewhat deficient in the ethics department, Heather has no trouble using her smoking body to get our man to open just a bit more widely than he should have. When the article comes out, Naylor is nearly done for and then comes the kidnapping. After getting free he uses the attending publicity and his rhetorical jujitsu to completely disarm the Senator and his plans.

Along the way is a trip to Hollywood with the boy. Nick thinks the key to turning around the tobacco image problems is to go back to what worked so well in the ’30s and ’40s: hot movie stars lighting up. Their trip is to meet with superagent Rob Lowe who is arranging, for the small product placement fee of $25 million, that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie enjoy a post-coital smoke in a soon to film far future science fiction flick. Also, Nick has to drop off a briefcase of cash with a cancer-stricken former Marlboro Man (Sam Elliot). The cash isn’t hush money, but close.

I noticed some web commentators claiming that Thank You for Smoking is not only not a satire, its the opposite, a pro-smoking commercial. Anyone who read the original novel would know better.

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