Thank You for Smoking

One of the most impressive things a movie can do is to make the audience get behind the bad guy. It worked ridiculously well for Mel Gibson in Payback, one of my all-time favorites (which is coming out with a drastically re-cut version after the new year).

In Thank You for Smoking, you really get behind Aaron Eckhart as he talks his way into making a sick-child group seem evil, getting cigarettes into space and as he mentors his son into being a successful arguer.

Eckhart plays Nick Naylor, the very public face of the collection of cigarette companies commonly referred to as Big Tobacco. As he puts it, he is "paid to talk." Officially, his title is the lobbyist for the companies, trying to get his way in Washington, D.C. He has two comrades, the lobbyist for Alcohol, Maria Bello, and the lobbyist for the Firearm industry, the amazingly funny David Koechner, The three of them make up they are informally called the "Merchants of Death," or the MOD Squad.

Throughout the course of the film, Eckhart talks to his son's class about being a lobbyist, during which he makes the point of "deciding for yourself what's best," which sounds dangerously close to encouraging a class of 6th graders to start smoking. Somewhere in the fold, Katie Holmes, a reporter for a national newspaper, interviews Eckhart for a piece in her paper, and then has sex with him a bunch of times. Eckhart also has to deal with William H. Macy, a senator from Vermont, who has taken it upon himself to adorn every cigarette pack with a big skull-and-crossbones picture with the word "POISON" emblazoned underneath it.

But perhaps the crux of the film is when he takes his son, who he only gets to see on the weekend, due to divorce, on his business trip to Los Angeles to try and get some cigarette product-placement in the film industry. Eckhart wants his son to see just what he does up close, and his son wants to learn more about convincing people to do whatever he wants them to believe. In a choice scene, Eckhart is teaching his son the tricks of the arguing trade. In a mock debate about chocolate versus vanilla ice cream, Eckhart teaches his son that, if he proves that vanilla is not the best flavor in the world, then by default he's won. Proving the other side wrong makes you right.

This is one of the smartest satires I've ever seen. Every scene that depicts Nick Naylor as the good guy, every scene the depicts the senator of Vermont a socks-with-sandals-wearing hippie, every joke David Koechner makes, you can feel satire oozing out of it. However, the remarkable thing is that, at the center of all the satire, the story is about a father trying to make a connection with a son he rarely sees, a son that sees him as the hero we all used to see our fathers as.

In the end, if you want a sometimes-biting-but sometimes-subtle satire, wrapped inside a bunch of very well-executed jokes and some affecting father-son moments, this is the movie for you.