“Thank You for Smoking” a Snappy Satire
by Mark Canavera on April 6, 2006 in Culture
“Thank You for Smoking” is a snappy satire centered on Nick Naylor, a lobbyist for Big Tobacco. Naylor (Aaron Eckhart) works for the Academy of Tobacco Studies, a pseudo research institute that pumps out industry-friendly studies as fodder for public relations. He is a master of spin and a king of his craft.
Eckhart has made a career playing alpha males in corporate settings, such as his frightening, electrifying debut in “In the Company of Men” and his Broadway turn in “Fat Pig.” Here, it’s gratifying to see what Eckhart can make of his stock character in a movie with a different tone. In an early voiceover, Eckhart’s character asks rhetorically, “You know that guy who can bag any chick? I’m that guy…on crack.”
In a movie that is both tongue-in-cheek and deadly serious, Eckhart masters a delicate balance. There is tricky work to be done here: audiences have been trained to identify with movie protagonists, but fortunately for a movie about the tobacco industry, Eckhart will not pander to that knee-jerk reaction. Taking Naylor as a fascinating object for study, Eckhart neither caricatures nor overly humanizes him.
For the most part, the script helps, placing Naylor in a variety of settings in which we get to see his impressive communications skills on display. We see Naylor turn corporate responsibility on its head during a taping of “The Joan Lunden Show,” by the end of which a young boy with cancer is enthusiastically shaking Naylor’s hand. Going head to head with an anti-smoking senator on a political talk show, Naylor plays the peacock, trouncing the senator with a few well placed words.
The material itself is good satire: it should make us angry but is presented in a way that makes us laugh. How can we not laugh at Naylor’s circle of friends, composed of lobbyists for the alcohol and firearms lobbies? They call themselves the MOD squad, standing for “Merchants of Death.”
This movie really belongs to the actors, and it is filled with quirky supporting characters who are one-part human, two-parts camp, all played to perfection. William H. Macy is deliciously dorky as a pretentious, do-gooder senator from Vermont, and Rob Lowe mines his inner loser to great comic effect as an entertainment industry mogul.
The film occasionally missteps when it crosses the line from witty banter into cheap pot-shots, and parts of the script seem like underdeveloped Saturday Night Live skits. The film is also deeply noncommittal on the theme of parenting, though the substantial role that Naylor’s son plays in the movie would lead the viewer to believe that the filmmakers intended to make some sort of commentary on what it means to be a good parent.
In the end, the movie is less a critique of lobbyists - in a perverse sort of way, it admires a good lobbyist no matter what the cause - than it is a defense of the freedom of choice. Given that priority, the movie’s final scenes are earnest but luckily never descend into didacticism or heavy-handedness.
Instead, the movie stands it satirical ground right until the very end, landing in a different place than I expected it to. The filmmakers make the viewer a generous final offer: “Tobacco lobbyists are neither the scum of the earth nor stupid. Discuss.”
Final grade (on the Dean’s recommended grading scale): B+
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