Movie Review: Thank You For Smoking

This weekend, I saw Thank You For Smoking at the Plaza Frontenac Theater in the mall of the same name on Friday. I had to do a little talking to get the wife interested, but she eventually caved and I think I get out of this without owing a chick flick.

In short: Great movie. This is the kind of dark comedy that I love, the kind that tests your values and makes your skin crawl at the dire sadness of our plight. I suppose I should go into some detail about the movie, so let us get on with that.

Our hero is the chief public lobbyist for Big Tobacco. He is played, brilliantly, by Aaron Eckhart, who you will recognize, though maybe not from what. Maybe Nurse Betty or Erin Brockovich. Maybe you like genre flicks like me and you remember him as Ben Affect-less's smarmy employer in Paycheck. Those are the flicks where I've seen him. He's got Redford reminiscent looks (the wife says yeah, but not quite as hot as Redford at the same age) and that cleft chin that just says movie evil. Or icky. Therefore, he's a perfect cast as Nick Naylor, divorced father of one and lead spokesperson for what is probably the least morally defensible industry allowed by law. While the man is despicable in his work, more so because he's so GOOD at it, you still find yourself liking him. He's very human, but he doesn't let that get in the way of his work. In a way, because Eckhart is so flawless in his performance of a brilliantly written role, you are touched by his desire to teach his kid his trade. While I'm, as a rule, not a fan of kids in movies, Cameron Bright is one of the kids I actually like. He was one of the bright spots in Running Scared, and here, he provides a great foil for Eckhart, trying to absorb every nuance of his dad's profession. Particularly touching/disturbing is a conversation between the two about debate, where the father and son debate the merits of chocolate and vanilla as the best flavors. When Dad makes his coup, the kid is unconvinced, clinging to chocolate, and decidedly unimpressed. When Dad explains his victory, noting that he doesn't have to convince you, his opponent, but rather has to prove you wrong to the audience, the kid is awed. In the next shot, both are eating vanilla ice cream cones.

Things are not necessarily going well for our hero. He has a nemesis, William H. Macy, who plays a senator from Vermont, who has it in for Big Tobacco. In fact, he wants to put a sticker on the front of every pack of cigarettes featuring a large skull and crossbones. Now, my first instinct as an MBA marketer is to make lemons into lemonade. Of course, you fight the sticker, but you also prepare for the sticker eventuality. How? You make the skull and crossbones cool. You bring pirates back into the lexicon of the über-cool. (Side question here: if you were a pirate, why would you fly the skull-and-crossbones flag? Isn't that just inviting canon fire? Fly the flag of Switzerland instead. No one shoots at the Swiss.) Any rate, the Senator is pretty far-gone, too, recutting classic movies to take the ciggies out. I suppose this is based in reality, but it's stupid here, too. Kids don't start smoking because the Hump smoked in the Maltese Falcon or Dietrich puffed in Blue Angel. Or even because of all the characters Joe Eszterhas wrote. They start because their friends do. Or their older siblings. Or their parents. Or the school bully. It's an externality. If I can pull a flaw from the movie, it's that Macy's Senator is just not a real rival to Eckhart's Naylor. When we first meet Eckhart, he's dismantling one of Macy's underlings on a daytime talk show, even winning the cancer kid on the panel over to his side. At their next meeting, an appearance on the Dennis Miller show (is there still such a thing?), Eckhart dismantles Macy. The verbose Senator is reduced to something short and nonsensical, which Miller says, "says it all." At the big show down, in front of Congress, you know Naylor is gonna win. He doesn't have an adversary worthy of his talents. On further reflection, this probably mirrors reality better than we would like to think. On the other hand, in the real world, half the Senators on the panel would be in Tobacco's pocket already, so the speeches wouldn't do anything. Don't buy that, check out the last two Supreme Court Senate confirmation hearings. Examine the questions of say, Senator Jeff Sessions. Here are his questions for Alito. Here's a searchable database on Roberts. If you go through day by day, you can pull Sessions's portions. Nope, he's not in anyone's pocket. Sessions is clearly his own man. And yet, he gets a vote to approve or disapprove members of the high courts of this land. If you're not depressed, you're not paying attention. At any rate, while I think a MOVIE hero needs a MOVIE challenge, there is a certain reality to the overmatched Senator and the too-damn-slick-and-smart Lobbyist.

Perhaps, in recognition that the Senator doesn't pose a real threat to Naylor, the writers decided to throw other obstacles in Naylor's way. He faces, and has hot sex with the future mother of Tom Cruise's child, here playing an investigative reporter, looking to destroy our hero. Our hero takes her to bed. Well, that's maybe a poor description. He has stand up sex with her holding onto any high bar she can find in his apartment. She holds onto the hanging pot rack. She hangs on to a closet bar. She hangs from a doorframe. And our hero spills the beans. All of them. When the article finally runs, it is the low point of the movie for our hero. You'd think it couldn't get any lower after he survives an assassination attempt (the weapon was nicotine patches. He only survives because of his lifetime use of ciggies. The Doctor says, "I never thought I'd say this, but cigarette smoking saved your life." Big laugh.), and has to give up smoking forever (seems implausible... if you survive an alcohol toxicity incident, you don't have to give up booze forever, though you might want to look into it). The article is a new low. It outs the movie deal he was working on (very funny piece with Rob Lowe and that kid from the OC, you know, the dark haired one on my wife's list of crushes behind Hawkeye and Ralph Fiennes, but ahead of Will Smith). It outs his friends, the Merchants of Death (the head lobbyists for alcohol and guns). It outs the Marlboro Man's, whose silence Naylor bought in a scene that was morally troubling, even for our hero. His relationship with his kid is featured in the article, and our hero is not depicted as a loving father. Rather, he is shown as a corrupter of youth. This is the low point. He loses his job. His friends get mad at him. And the Senate is probably gonna get its goofy sticker.

Inevitably, our hero rallies, and appears at the Senate meeting. His testimony is common sense, pitted against a government determined to become Big Mother. Macy is left looking stupid and hypocritical. And Naylor is back on top again. He's offered his old job back, but he declines. He becomes a consultant (Is this the new American Dream? As a currently working, self-employed consultant, I can tell you, it's not really better than regular employment. Maybe it will get there.). His son wins the debate championship. The circle of bad lobbyists expands. And all is right with the world.

Sort of. If you leave the movie with that feeling, you've missed the point. The real point can be found in the son's paper topic. He's told to write a two-page paper resolving, "Why is the American government the best government?" Dad's immediate answer is the endless appeals system. He then hems and haws, attacking the question. Is it really the best government? And I think that's the central question here. Is this the best government? Can't we do any better? And what does that say about us.

While I was writing this, I remembered my strategy to eliminate smoking, without excessive tariffs, expensive advertising and education campaigns, big warnings stickers or a retroactive smoking ban in our media. The trick is like this: You make it illegal to smoke in bars. In clubs and restaurants. In stadiums. In zoos. In office buildings. You reduce the number of places you can smoke to: outside on the street, in your own home, and in your car. You even make people move thirty feet from a door to a building. Then people have to smoke in the snow and rain, in the wind and the earthquakes. You can smoke and get hailed on or you can not smoke. I predict that smoking will fall by 60% in the first ten years. At that point, your tobacco farmer will be squeezed somewhat and look into other crops. Your tobacco companies will be squeezed and look into other products. And if you attack the supply side, you force the consumer to find a different vice. Tobacco is too hard to process for your own ciggy use. Too much land, too much time, too many additives. Cut the demand, you squeeze the supply and you get the externality working for the public good. And we have a less smoky world. If there's one thing I miss about living in Los Angeles, it was the indoor air quality. In Saint Louis, people smoke in restaurants and bars. In LA, it's against the law. And I bet there are fewer smokers, per capita, in LA than here. And they don't even have rain (much less snow, hail or tornados... What was I thinking in moving here?) outside to make outdoor smokers miserable there.

Last note: If you don't think smoking is a public health problem, you are not thinking big enough. Eventually, smokers wind up in the public health system. My payroll taxes, and yours as well, go to treat their emphysema. There is something called opportunity cost that comes into play. The definition I have linked to is a little more in depth than you need. For the rest of us, OpCost is just the value of stuff you passed on to do the thing you are doing. So, if I have seven bucks and I go see Thank You For Smoking, I am passing on all the other movies that I might have liked better. Since it was a great movie, my OpCost is less than the benefit that I got from seeing TYFS. If, instead, I went to see From Justin To Kelly (I saw that, too), I made a mistake, because the value, in happiness, of my other opportunities was higher than the option I picked. I hope that's clear.

By reducing the number of smokers, we don't treat as many cases of things caused by smoking, leaving benefit for people who less willfully caused their own problems. Now before you think that I'm against smoking entirely, I want to correct you. I think smoking is fine for the people who smoke. But their rights end at the margin of mine. I don't want to breathe your smoke and I don't want to pay for your biopsies. I believe in the public welfare, but I'm a little more conservative when it comes to people who smoke, knowing full well that ciggys are bad for you in the long term.

I lied: This is the last note: Thank you for Smoking is a very good film. Very entertaining while being a nice think piece. If you leave without thinking, you blew it. You missed the whole flick. And I don't know that I can offer higher praise than "It made me think." So, that's that.