Film Review: Thank You for Smoking

Thank You for Smoking is a delightfully snarky little film that takes a jaundiced eye at human nature in general and Washington politics in particular. No one in the movie is entirely honorable (to say the least!), but everyone is a delight to watch.

At the center of the story is Nick Naylor, played with dead pan panache by Aaron Eckhart. Naylor is the spokesman for Big Tobacco and is honest both to himself and to us the audience about what he does. His job is to defend an industry that kills twelve hundred people a day. Next to him, most of the great killers of world history are mere pikers.

Yet, he does his job so well that in one of the first scenes, on a TV talk show where he is outnumbered about four to one by anti tobacco guests and where the audience is about ready to get a rope and string him up, he manages to get most of the folks over to his point of view. Even the dying cancer kid guest shakes his hand.

Naylor’s arch enemy is a Senator from Vermont, the pompous, self absorbed Ortolan K. Finistirre, played by one of the great character actors of our age, William H. Macy. While the good Senator is supposed to be one of the “good guys”, he comes across as a bit of an ass.

Naylor’s other enemy, though at first he doesn’t know it at first, is the spunky and ambitious reporter Heather Holloway, played by Katie Holmes. The reason Naylor doesn’t know that Holloway is a threat is that she is rogering him silly while extracting all of his secrets for the big expose article she is writing.

Naylor comforts himself from the woes of his chosen profession with a weekly lunch with the two other “merchants of death.” They are Polly Bailey who speaks for big alcohol, played by Mario Bello, and Bobby Jay Bliss, a good old boy who spins for big firearms, played by David Koechner.