Aaron Eckhart's tobacco lobbyist Nick Naylor also visits an exclusive, plantation-era gentleman's club in Jason Reitman's indie cause célèbre Thank You for Smoking, an adaptation of Christopher Buckley's arch novel about a few weeks in the life of one of the most despised people, engaged in one of the most despised professions on the face of the planet. The revelation of Thank You for Smoking--that cigarettes aren't good for you--is notably beside the greater point that we're seeing a lot of movies now in which people in positions of power at every level are portrayed as venal, ineffectual, opportunistic liars desperately in need of (and/or deserving of) being put down with extreme prejudice.

The obvious problem with Thank You for Smoking is that it's at least a decade past its sell-by date for satires of how we're manipulated by media messages (certainly by the evils of Big Tobaccy); the virtue of it is that it's a tight, slick piece of amoral black comedy centered around an asshole (and Eckhart hasn't been this good since his last great asshole turn in In the Company of Men) who doesn't spend a lot of time rationalizing the evil that he does. It's a film, then, for word junkies and spin-doctors who get off on semantics and out-smarting debate opponents even when they're defending the weaker flank. Its wider appeal, though, is ironically predicated on the extent to which much of its audience gets off on thinking they're gaining some sort of insight into anything other than how deliciously wicked is this yuppie Mephistopheles. (Meaning, essentially, that most have been seduced by the bad guy, which Reitman neatly underscores by portraying the Media as the ogre for Just Telling the Truth. Meaning that for all the liberal drum-beating, Truth is still the bad guy.) So the Devil is attractive. As messages go, Milton told us that in the seventeenth century. We could argue that Eve learned it some time before that.

But Thank You for Smoking is slippery as hell. It identifies the last smokers in mainstream movies as the "RAVs" (Russians, Arabs, and Villains) on its way to manipulating its audience into hissing at an opportunistic young reporter (Katie Holmes) who trades on her--there's that phrase again--"exquisite tits" in order to write an extremely frank, entirely accurate story on the life of a tobacco lobbyist. In so doing, the picture demonstrates that if the last smokers in entertainment are bad guys and Europeans, the last irredeemable wrongdoers are journalists. We're slaves to conventions and images and saucy turns of phrase (another subplot involves the campaign of fey, Birkenstock-wearing Vermont senator Finistirre (William H. Macy) trying to get a skull and crossbones printed on every pack of cigarettes), the film tells us, and then it proceeds to use images and conventions and saucy turns of phrase to manipulate our sympathy with this self-proclaimed shark. The lobby of a Hollywood production company features a big-screen playing killer whales exuberantly playing with dying seals, and the head of said company (Rob Lowe) is reverently said to "really love Asian shit" in the middle of sand gardens and silk kimonos. It's loony-tunes and it's exactly the tenor of Los Angeles, just as the rest of it is exactly the tenor of the Beltway, just as Eckhart (and J.K. Simmons as his cigar-chewing boss, Robert Duvall as a julep-slurping tobacco baron, and on and on) are exactly the tenor of unctuous power brokers, rigging Wall Street and the Super Bowl from a luxury cave in the Bahamas. Thank You for Smoking is a beauty: an honorary Neil LaBute picture about how easily we fall into moral ambiguity that exposes your own moral ambiguity.-Walter Chaw (excerpted from a longer review found here)

2.37:1 DVD capture: Thank You for Smoking

Fox presents Thank You for Smoking on DVD in competing widescreen and fullscreen editions--we received the former for review. The 2.37:1, 16x9-enhanced transfer is filmlike and sports reasonably supple contrast, although the colour palette seems extravagantly jaundiced. (Over at the reliable DVD MOVIE GUIDE, Colin Jacobson aptly compared it to "the yellow glaze on smoker's teeth.") While the accompanying Dolby Digital 5.1 audio is first-rate, I was surprised that the mix itself didn't have a little more juice to match the playful visuals. Two commentaries also append the film, both featuring hyphenate Jason Reitman, who's joined by actors Aaron Eckhart and David Koechner for the second yakker after flying solo in the first. By himself, Reitman struggles to fill 90 minutes ("I'm a big pizza eater," goes a typical observation), but thankfully he resists the temptation to narrate the action. Eckhart and an especially loquacious Koechner--who seems very much like his screen persona--bring out the raconteur in Reitman, though when the director excuses himself to take a leak threats to talk behind his back disappointingly amount to nothing. For what it's worth, the rumours surrounding Eckhart's sex scene with Katie Holmes being left out of the film when it premiered at Sundance are addressed and laid to rest in both yakkers.

Video-based extras include thirteen deleted scenes totalling 16 minutes with optional commentary from Reitman. Most of these were dropped because they interfered with either the pacing or tone of the film; happy to see the inexplicable alternate ending hit the cutting-room floor, and a meeting between Holmes' and William H. Macy's characters practically elided itself. ("We probably hurt the film's financial value for every frame of Katie we cut out," Reitman half-kids, but one imagines the opposite may hold true now that Holmes is a permanent resident of Never Never Land.) Next comes a segment of "The Charlie Rose Show" (18 mins.) reuniting Reitman (who resembles a slimmer Greg Grunberg), Eckhart, producer David O. Sacks, and source novelist Christopher Buckley. Here, the increasingly James Lipton-like Rose has a flash of insight that seems to catch Reitman, et al off guard whereby he links the appeal of protagonist Nick Naylor to the American cinema's deathless love affair with con artists. Two in-house featurettes--"Unfiltered Comedy: The Making of Thank You for Smoking" (9 mins.) and "America: Living in Spin" (5 mins.)--are wholly redundant and worthless in and of themselves, just glorified advertisements for something you already have in your possession. They join nifty poster, art, and storyboard galleries, the film's theatrical trailer, and a soundtrack spot in rounding out the platter. A Fox Searchlight reel cues up on startup.-Bill Chambers

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