Favorite Movies A-Z: Thank You for Smoking
Michael Jordan plays ball. Charles Manson kills people. I talk. Everyone has a talent.
Title: Thank You for Smoking
Release Date: 2005
Rating: R
Length: 92 minutes
Director: Jason Reitman
Starring: Aaron Eckhart, Cameron Bright, Maria Bello
Language: English
Country: USA
Recently I watched the film again with the commentary track playing (yes, I’m one of those weirdos who actually does that) and discovered that Jason Reitman doesn’t quite realize what kind of film he made. Of course, he’d say something similar about me, but the difference between us is that he’d be wrong and I’m right. He thinks he made an anti-smoking film with a comic twist. Actually, he made a film about personal liberty that uses smoking as the macguffin. It’s pretty great.
Maybe we’re not supposed to like Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart), but he certainly gets the best of the situations in which he finds himself. He’s a highly-paid, morally-flexible PR man for a non-profit “tobacco studies institute” of some sort. The exact name doesn’t matter because none of the names in the film are real, for the most part. (I think Camel or Marlboro might be mentioned in passing once or twice.) The story is a kind of excerpt from Naylor’s life as he navigates being divorced, having a son on the cusp of being a teen, and dealing with political fallout from the national campaign against smoking. It’s explicitly set immediately before the large settlement in the ‘90s that the tobacco companies made with the government admitting that they covered up some of the research revealing that smoking is unhealthy.
The obvious rejoinder, made explicitly by Naylor in the film to a Congressional hearing, is “duh.” By the time the lawsuit wrapped, it’s not like anyone didn’t know that smoking was unhealthy. People might argue about “second-hand smoke” and how dangerous it is, but the vast majority of people agree that there are certainly long-term health risks associated with tobacco use. The problem the government has now that the conversation has shifted, however, is that in order to achieve its ends it now has to be more explicit that it wants to stop people from doing something risky.
This, in turn, gets the hackles up on even non-smokers who think that the best amount of government telling people how to live their lives is the minimal amount of government telling people how to live their lives. (People like me, in other words.) After all, a government that can make you eat your vegetables is a government that make you do darn near anything. But that’s enough politics for one movie review.
What makes this film great is the humor and wonderful performances from a wide range of great actors. Eckhart is good, if not perhaps great. But JK Simmons, Maria Bello, Robert Duvall, Sam Elliott, William H. Macy, Rob Lowe, Katie Holmes…it’s a pretty stacked cast in support. The whole thing is based on a book by Christopher Buckley (the politics of whom I would also argue are a bit confused)) and pointedly skewers the hypocrisy of just about everyone who comes across the screen. It’s unsparing of politicians, businessmen, lobbyists, movie producers, actors, and even ordinary people. Few things have made me laugh harder than Naylor absolutely crushing the spirit of a small girl in his son’s class when she tries to argue with him about smoking.
The turning point in the film is Naylor giving an uncharacteristically forthright interview to a newspaper reporter (Katie Holmes), largely because he’s enamored by her looks and her willingness to sleep with him. Though the fallout from his honesty leads to him being fired from his job, he does have one thing as a fallback: his talent for debate. Movie debates always feel a bit contrived; the participants are all arguing from one point of view, really. (The screenwriter nearly always has a viewpoint and you can often tell what it is by which arguments are real and which are strawmen.) Given what we’ve seen him talk his way out of and into over the preceding two reels, it’s not hard to guess that he’ll talk his way out of this mess. What’s fun is how he does it.
At most, the end of the film is ambivalent about smoking. Sure, it’s bad for you. But lots of things shorten your life, statistically speaking. The way we eat, riding motorcycles, going skydiving or mountain-climbing, not exercising enough; heck, maybe even cell phones. (There’s a nice nod to the fact that in the ‘90s we had a brief scare that radiation from our phones was going to give everyone brain cancer.) In the end, however, Naylor is a hero for allowing people to make decisions about their own lives and maintaining parents as the primary influence on their own children. A minimalist message, and a welcome one. All the better that it comes wrapped in a hilarious package.