THANK YOU FOR SMOKING

"Michael Jordan plays ball, Charles Manson kills people, I talk."

In 1994 Christopher Buckley published a hell-blazing novel entitled THANK YOU FOR SMOKING, which satirized the tobacco industry. Tobacco was a huge issue at the time and was a very relevant topic of discussion amidst American society.

Fast-forward twelve years and the novel has been turned into a film with the same name. Aaron Eckhart stars as the head lobbyist for Big Tobacco, Nick Naylor. Naylor meets with the two other members of the MOD (Merchants of Death), Polly Bailey of the Alcohol Industry and Billy Jay Bliss of the Firearms Industry (Maria Bello and David Koechner), to talk about whose products kill more people per year and thus have the largest societal impact. Naylor’s product wins by a long shot, and he is not incorrect when he says cigarettes kill 1,200 Americans per day.

Naylor’s moral problem is that after he argues (and wins) about the shockingly high death rate of the product he is pitching, he must go home to his thirteen-year-old son Joey (Cameron Bright) and bring him up to be the best man. Naylor says he is torn over this, as he expresses his troubles to his ex-wife as well as revealing perhaps too much information to a young reporter trying to cash in her chips via a muckraking article on the tobacco business (Katie Holmes). I had trouble believing him or relating with him because Eckhart’s facial expressions throughout the entire film seemed to range from a toothy, giddy grin to a smug grin. Eckhart might as well have thrown on a bathrobe instead of a $1000 suit, because he sleepwalks through the role.

While the plot is not particularly moving, it is not entirely unentertaing either. Most of the supporting characters (the cast also included JK Simmons, Robert Duvall, Rob Lowe, Sam Elliot, and William H. Macy) are funny, witty, and interesting, and a few jokes really hit the spot. Where first-time writer/director Jason Reitman took the wrong step was when he adapted a satirical book into a film where the relevance of the satire was pretty much gone. When the Master Settlement Agreement was signed in 1999 and the four biggest tobacco companies paid out nearly a quarter billion dollars to the American people, most of the eyes that had any intention of learning about this subject were opened.

C+