I fancy myself a cynic and pragmatist. While I do enjoy the flicks that have a bleak outlook on life and the future, I also enjoy a film that can play the proverbial fiddle while Rome burns. Thank You For Smoking is one of those films. It's a shame I didn't get around to seeing it when it was first released, and all along the way I've had people telling me it was one of those flicks I needed to see. Before director Jason Reitman gained his broad success with Juno, he tested the waters of absurdism and surrealism with this film. While some argue Juno was simply "too much", I think Thank You for Smoking manages a good balance, especially when covering an issue that affects many more people than teen pregnancy.
Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart) is a lobbyist for big tobacco and has made his money "selling spin" and keeping the general public from completely turning against the people who make cigarettes. There aren't that many films that share my cynicism, or at the very least lack of humanistic idealism. People use their work to push for one side of an argument and worse yet paint the issue as black and white. What I liked about Thank You for Smoking was that it covered all the bases. You can't leave this movie and say for certain it was for or against tobacco, because it doesn't proport either position. It lets you see it through the eyes of a man who has to play devil's advocate for a living.
Juno was a film heavy on quirky dialogue and it was definitely something that rubbed people the wrong way. Thank You for Smoking is full of snappy dialogue and sardonic quips, but doesn't inundate you with it. You still can feel like there are people on this Earth who talk like the characters in this film. It has more than a few moments that are surreal, but it injects them with enough wryness that we still buy into it. That being said, I don't find many of the things that Naylor says or does to promote big tobacco, or any of the other characters in the movie, push the boundries of the kind of twists in argument someone in their position might use in real life. Naylor even says it's not about proving yourself right, "I've just proven you're wrong. And if you're wrong, I'm right."
It's a film that not only analyzes the issues we find in America today, but how we work with, through, or around them. Thank You for Smoking with feed your inner cynic. It will make you laugh and wryly smile at some of the unfortunate truths in the modern world. It doesn't come out and say that smoking is good or bad. It says the issue isn't that simple; and neither are most issues for that matter.