Jason Reitman’s film version of Christopher Buckley’s novel,
Thank You for Smoking, gets you hooked and leaves you
wanting more, just like the cigarettes that are the occasion of so
much of its infectious humor. Also like cigarettes, it’s probably
bad for you. What’s missing is any sense of moral indignation —
not towards cigarettes or tobacco companies, about whom moral
indignation is cheap and lacking in satirical kick, but towards the
“spin” industry that is the film’s real subject.
Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart) is a crack public relations
spokesman for the tobacco industry in Washington who travels all
over the country to debate the Puritans and health nuts and even
cancer victims who want to punish Big Tobacco for undermining the
nation’s health. Periodically he meets with his fellow “Merchants
of Death” Polly Bailey (Maria Bello) and Bobby Jay Bliss (David
Koechner) — spokesmen for producers of alcoholic beverages and gun
manufacturers respectively — to indulge in a bit of swagger about
whose product kills more people and who, therefore, has the more
challenging job. These people, we are meant to understand, are the
elite of the PR trade.
Now you may have noticed a certain implausibility about all
this. In real life, none of these industries has adopted such an
aggressive stance in putting its case before the public. Tobacco,
especially, doesn’t seem to bother defending itself at all anymore.
In the wake of the multi-billion dollar settlement with the state
attorneys-general in the 1990s, Big Tobacco has pretty much rolled
over and played dead, concentrating on its export markets while
quietly continuing to feed the habits of the millions of pathetic
addicts left out in the cold to suck their smoke in bedraggled
little groups by the onward march of manners, morals, and public
hygiene.
The film tries to get around this by setting Nick’s adventures
back in the early 1990s, when Mr. Buckley’s book came out, but it
can’t quite avoid conveying to the audience the sense of being out
of date. When Nick is kidnapped by anti-smoking fanatics and stuck
all over with nicotine patches, our first reaction is likely to be:
“Remember when that’s what we thought of as terrorism?” I
find this particularly regrettable because I consider myself to be
one of the few remaining adherents of what we must now regard as
the lost cause that Nick represents — or ought to have
represented. It is the failed crusade against the therapeutic ethos
in law and public policy. In other words, I believe that people
should be treated as morally autonomous and therefore responsible
themselves for what they eat, drink, and smoke — not as the
victims of their own appetites or psychology or of wicked corporate
interests. I believe this not just because it is right but because
it is necessary if we are to have a properly functioning
democracy.
Nick doesn’t believe it. Or if he does he never says so. His
defense of the merchants of death is always clever and funny and
outrageous but entirely cynical. “Challenge authority,” he advises
young people: “perhaps instead of acting like sheep when it comes
to cigarettes, you should find out for yourself.” But it is rarely
possible to take his arguments seriously. He shows himself to be an
unrepentant sophist when he advises his own young son (Cameron
Bright) that “the beauty of argument is that if you argue correctly
you’re never wrong.” But some people are wrong — and
others are right — and arguing “correctly” so as to disguise the
fact is itself at least as deadly an addiction as smoking. In the
end Nick himself presumably understands this, for he breaks himself
of both addictions. His earlier cynicism and outrageousness is
meant to be taken light-heartedly, but because it supposes that the
only possible defense of freedom is his cynical and outrageous one,
the film ultimately comes down on the side of the health nuts.
Of course, most people won’t mind that as much as I do, and I
hasten to add that there are many funny bits that make the picture
worth seeing. One of my favorites comes when Nick travels to
Hollywood to negotiate a bit of product placement with a powerful
producer called Jeff Megall (Rob Lowe). When it is proposed that
the best vehicle for Nick’s purposes is a science fiction yarn set
in outer space, Nick sees a possible objection.
“Wouldn’t that be a problem? You know, smoking in a space
station — in an all-oxygen environment?”
Jeff is momentarily taken aback, but then replies: “That’s an
easy fix. All it takes is one line: ‘Thank God we invented the —
whatever.’”
There are also memorable turns by Robert Duvall as “The
Captain,” an old tobacco baron now, like the industry itself, on
his last legs, by Sam Elliott as a former Marlborough Man now dying
of cancer, and by William H. Macy as a sandal-wearing senator from
Vermont who gets the unattractive self-righteousness and
self-importance of the political busybody just right. If only he
and all that he stands for had been a little more central to the
proceedings instead of just being incidental to them, a sort of
drive-by satirical shooting.
The performance by Katie Holmes, the future Mrs. Tom Cruise, as
a reporter prepared to sleep with Nick in order to expose the
scandalous cynicism behind his advocacy is, I think, less
successful. No matter. Generally, the film is fast-paced and never
less than amusing, and as a satire on the public relations
“industry” very enjoyable. I just think it would have been better
if the satire had been given more of an edge and if Nick had been
given a less defensible case — say that of the trial lawyers who
shook down the tobacco industry for billions.
