Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is the greatest film satire of all time (meaning it’s about half as good as the collected works of Trey Parker and Matt Stone). All satires that aspire to Dr. Strangelove’s level of greatness – if not South Park’s – must be judged by three criteria: the freshness of their targets, the fearlessness of their execution and the narrative resolve never to go soft. Satire is the sworn enemy of sentimentality.
So how does Thank You For Smoking stack up?
On the first criterion, it’s fresher than an ear of corn in Iowa. Over the last 15 years, and especially since the Big Tobacco settlements of the late ‘90s, smoking has become the great bogeyman of (liberal) American society. It’s banned in most public places in the West and Northeast. Its advertising is limited to magazines, NASCAR and promotions at bars where girls use ID-checking devices to make sure you’re 18 that are more sophisticated than what the bouncer uses to make sure you’re 21. And as Jeff Megall’s serene superagent (Rob Lowe) aptly notes in Thank You For Smoking, the only people left in movies who smoke are “RAVs”: Russians, Arabs and villains.
Antismoking hysteria has reached epidemic proportions: secondhand smoke is almost universally considered a killer, despite studies relying on the flimsiest of proof; any state legislature looking for a quick injection of revenue can raise taxes on cigarettes and nobody makes a stink; and antismoking commercials now spend less time emphasizing the health risks of smoking and more time demonizing cigarette companies for having the gall to sell, and god forbid, market, a legal product. The antismoking crusade has had nothing but love the last 10 years; it was due for a good hating.
I blame it all on C3PO catching R2D2 smoking a furtive fag in the bowels of the Death Star. Wouldn’t you need a cigarette if you spent everyday with a neurotic, repressed homosexual robot?
But perhaps the best measure of the audacity of the movie’s target – which is to say, the sanctity of its target – was my mid-50-something mother’s response to a trailer for the movie before a showing of Munich in December. With a look of disgust on her face, she asked, “Why are people laughing?
But picking an un-P.C. target is the easy part. How does Thank You For Smoking fare on criterion two, fearless execution?
One of the trickiest tasks facing all satires is the protagonist. If the premise of good satire is that everyone is hypocritical and corrupt, how do you concoct a hero that’s not hatable? Most satires take the easy way out, by choosing innocents, if not simpletons, as their heroes – think Forrest Gump, Being There’s Chauncy Gardiner, even South Park’s fourth graders. But Thank You For Smoking comes from the much rarer strain of satire (call it “The Bad Santa School”) where the protagonist is as vile as everyone else. In a world where everyone’s full of shit, we like Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart, in a role he was born to play) because at least he’s honest about being full of shit.
Indeed, as a lobbyist for Big Tobacco, Naylor beams about his B.S. He delights in turning familiar arguments on their head – he asks a Senate panel considering a sterner warning label for cigarette packs, “Why do we need a warning if everyone know it kills?” On a talk show with a 15-year-old cancer survivor, he wonders, “Why would cigarettes want to kill this boy? Wouldn’t we want him living as long as possible, and buying our products?” He is the ultimate devil’s advocate because, as a representative of an industry that kills half a million people a year, he nearly is the Devil’s advocate.
It looks like a Marlboro Red or Medium but I can’t be sure. I’d like to think he smokes American Spirits.
The film is clearly on his side; while we understand where Naylor’s coming from, his nemesis, Senator Ortolan K. Finistirre (William H. Macy, who has the strange and dopey look of a lifelong politician) is sanctimonious, humorless and cruel. Otherwise, the movie’s satire is wonderfully egalitarian. It mocks Big Tobacco’s junk science as readily as it ridicules antismoking advocates’ fear tactics (in the movie’s best visual gag, Finistirre suggests a warning label for cigarette packs featuring a skull and crossbones where the skull looks like the guy from Edwin Munch’s “The Scream” if he were wearing a hockey mask and bleeding from his neck). No sacred cow is left unburned – even cancer victims aren’t safe.
On the third criterion, toughness, the film slightly falters, but not in the most important ways. The one American institution that escapes the movie’s sights is the American family; Naylor is a devoted father to a wide-eyed son, and his ex-wife is a sympathetic, put-upon divorcé. While the son is intended to make us see the softer side of Naylor, and he’s a useful device in conversations where Naylor explains himself, I wished the kid were a tad more conniving. Whenever Naylor and his son are alone together in a scene, the movie goes maudlin.
But on the most important score, the ending, the movie doesn’t go soft. In lesser hands, the climactic Senate hearing where Naylor and Finistirre face off would devolve into a martyr-ish mess where Naylor finally admits that smoking kills and that he’s been wrong all along. But the climax’s brilliance is that it allows Naylor to be completely honest and completely audacious at the same time; when Finistirre asks Naylor what he will do when his son turns 18, Naylor hems and haws and finally says, “If he wants to smoke, I’ll buy him his first pack.” It’s a funny and sobering moment because it makes clear that in modern America, freedom of choice is as much under attack as smoking.
There is one glaring problem with the movie, however: nobody is ever seen lighting up. We know that Naylor smokes – he reaches for a pack while his son is napping on his lap, but the pack is empty. There are other characters, like Robert Duvall’s Captain, who surely must smoke, but we never see a character even finger an unlit cigarette.
I think I know why Jason Reitman, the co-writer and director, chose not to show anybody smoking. He probably figured it would be a tough enough sell to get viewers to sympathize with a tobacco lobbyist without seeing him smoke next to his sleeping son. But Reitman’s choice is a miscalculation; the kind of people who are going to see Thank You For Smoking already have a healthy skepticism of antismoking advocates. They’re ready to see the likes of Finistirre skewered and Naylor celebrated. Showing Naylor smoking would complicate their sympathies, but not eradicate them. (Besides, the kind of contrarians who are drawn to movies like Thank You For Smoking are often smokers themselves.)
Moreover, there are some missed comic opportunities by not showing smokers. Think of the nicotine-fiending New Yorkers who shiver in the cold for a cig while passersby avoid them like a drunk hobo. Or the way cigarette-smoking travelers are forced into unventilated glass rooms in airports so frequent flyers can shake their heads at these modern lepers. Indeed, if the movie had shown the way smokers are ghettoized from polite society, many viewers would have more sympathy for the film’s message, not less.
But despite some missteps, Thank You For Smoking gets all the big things right. That’s something to be thankful for.
Posted by myownworstcritic 
