Thank You For Smoking

A new review from The Movie Snob

Thank You For Smoking (B-). This is the first non-IMAX-documentary film that I have seen in forever! What has happened to me? Anyway, this movie is based on the novel of the same name by Christopher Buckley, son of famous right-wing journalist William F. Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart) is the chief lobbyist for the Academy of Tobacco Studies, the chief lobbying organ of Big Tobacco. He is completely amoral and yet amazingly charming as he goes on the Joan Lunden Show and cozies up to the stadard-issue "cancer kid" far more easily than the stiff, indignant public-health-watchdog guy. The movie has plenty of amusing moments, such as Naylor's weekly meeting for drinks with two other lobbyists, for alcohol and firearms, who collectively refer to themselves as the "MOD Squad," for "merchants of death." William H. Macy is dead-on as a humorless Vermont senator who abhors smoking and wants to put a hideous skull-and-crossbones on every pack of cigarettes. Rod Lowe is good as a Hollywood producer who's completely willing to get movie heroes, rather than villains, smoking again -- for the right price. But the whole is less than the sum of its parts, and I walked out confused as to what the message is, if any. Lobbying is bad, I guess. Worth a look.