Good satire requires relentless focus. There is no room for straying off the path when you're trying to stick it to the whores and the hypocrites. "Thank You For Smoking" lacks this kind of focus and as a result, the movie is a near miss. It's funny (sometimes fitfully so), but it also drags and sputters along the way. The basic idea — following the misadventures of semi-soulless tobacco flack Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart, "Paycheck") — is so good in itself that, at times, it feels like the production is coasting on it's initial inspiration. The movie succeeds, but just barely — it should have been better. How much anybody enjoys it will be based on how much narrative meandering you can put up with.
Most of the blame should go to first time director/screenwriter Jason Reitman. Working from the novel by Christopher Buckley, Reitman never really turns the heat on. His targets in the movie are relatively easy ones — vapid Hollywood agents, soulless tobacco execs and neo-puritanical politicians, and he makes sure that they all get skewered equally. In his haste to be an equal opportunity offender, Reitman defangs his own film. It doesn't help that he also employs painful film-school tricks like an insipid country-flavored soundtrack and intrusive voiceover narration, both of which detract from the film.
This being said, the movie is very nearly redeemed by the fact that, when it is working (which is fairly often), it is quite funny. Eckhart is a whirling dervish in the lead role, never tipping too far towards soullessness or contrition. The unfortunate by-product of this acting choice is that Nick remains a cipher throughout the movie, but you can't blame Eckhart for that. The script should have given him a clearer direction to take.
The rest of the talented cast — including Maria Bello, Robert Duvall, Rob Lowe, William H. Macy, Sam Elliott, J.K. Simmons, David Koechner and Todd Louiso — all turn in top comedic performances in roles which, for the most part, feel underwritten. These are all talented actors, but their roles all feel half-finished and they end up getting handcuffed.
The only member on the ensemble to really emerge is the always-reliable Kim Dickens ("House of Sand and Fog") who plays Nick's estranged wife. Stardom has always eluded Dickens, but she is a master of finely tuned supporting performances that straddle the line between melancholy and contentment. This is no exception. She is frustrated by Nick, clearly, but is also drawn to his boundless enthusiasm, the same way we are as audience members. Your eyes are drawn to her every time she is on screen.
The same cannot be said for Katie Holmes ("Pieces of April"), who is miscast as the eager cub reporter writing a profile on Nick for a Washington newspaper, and later ends up sleeping with him. Holmes isn't as good of an actress as Bello or Dickens and, as a result, she can't make the underwritten role her own.
The film is held together by the briefest thread of a plot — Nick is struggling, trying to find ways of selling smoking to an increasingly skeptical public, so he launches a risky venture with a Hollywood super agent (Lowe) to try and insert some high-profile product placement into new movies. As a whole, the film doesn't work, because there is nothing for it to work as. It's more of a breathless series of sprints, some of which provoke laughter, some of which do not. I didn't go for some of the bigger moments (like when Nick has to battle terrorists), but there is brilliance in the scenes where he tries to explain to his young son the importance of rhetoric, through a series of dizzying verbal two-steps.
The scenes with Lowe and his over-eager assistant (Adam Brody, Fox's "The O.C.") are equally impressive. There is a kind of bizzaro genius to the scheme Nick hatches, which aims to introduce a new superhero that is "Indiana Jones meets Jerry Maguire, but on two packs a day". The language they use feels so gloriously right (Lowe complains that the only people you see smoking in movies today are either Russians, Arabs or villains) that you wish the movie had focused on their byplay a bit more. Just as we've come to accept Lowe as out second lead, he's pushed to the side.
Reitman focuses much of his attention on the final showdown between Nick and the liberal do-gooder Seantor Orlolan Finistirre (Macy, "Sahara"). Their face-to-face battle is creaky, and a letdown, especially after the brilliance of some of the earlier scenes. The scenes between Nick and the Senator exist in a comedic vacuum, which highlights the basic problem with the movie: it falters exactly when it should be soaring.
There is another, unspoken problem with the film that only comes through as the movie progresses: who really cares that much about the tobacco industry in the year 2006? When Buckley wrote the novel in 1994, Big Tobacco hadn't settled with any victims of lung cancer so it felt as if Nick was still fighting against something. We know how it ends — Nick lost this war. Now, the tobacco lobby is basically powerless in Washington. Reitman tries to solve this problem, sort of, by suggesting in the final scenes that it was a period piece, but that doesn't jive with all the Brad Pitt/Catherine Zeta-Jones jokes we heard earlier.
A better director could have made sense of this material, but, at this point, Reitman isn't that good of a director. He's too in love with his camera and the concept of "making movies" to realize that there are times when less is more. I've heard it said that the key to filmmaking is a director who knows how to make choices. Even at 92 minutes, "Thank You For Smoking" plays like a movie where nobody made any choices.
3 out of 5
