When I was last in the United States, about six months after the planes hit the World Trade Centre in 2001, it seemed to me that there was only one issue on which all Americans were in agreement: smoking. Even smokers agreed that smoking was bad for you, and that they should go and indulge their filthy habit somewhere out of view.
South Africa seems to be moving towards that position, given that the single uncontested achievement of the present Ministry of Health is to further restrict the places in which smokers can light up. But that’s another story. My recollection of a country unified on at least one issue came back to me while watching Jason Reitman’s debut feature, Thank You for Smoking.
Aaron Eckhart plays Nick Naylor, a lobbyist for Big Tobacco. Things are somewhat stylised here, so we have to accept Big Tobacco as a monolithic entity — like Big Alcohol and Big Guns. Each of these monoliths has a single lobbyist, and the three of them form the “Mod Squad”, in which “Mod” stands for “Merchants of Death”, and they tend to meet over lunch and brag about whose industry has killed more people. Tobacco, naturally, is in the lead.
This is all very amusing, and Thank You for Smoking has a nice line in self-conscious black humour, certainly on the part of Nick, who is handsome, charming and persuasive. It helps that Eckhart is in the role, because that’s half the filmmakers’ work done. Nick Naylor has to present us with a paradox: a great guy, or at least great-seeming guy, doing a reprehensible job.
We see him, early on in the movie, making an unexpected success of a TV appearance opposite a teenager who’s dying of cancer from smoking. (Usually it takes a little longer than a few years of smoking to get cancer.) Nick’s argument is the traditional American one about personal freedom and the right to choose, but he’s also able to spin pretty much anything into propaganda that gives Big Tobacco some, er, breathing space. Nick does this, he tells an interlocutor and therefore us viewers, not because he believes in an industry that retails death by instalments, but because he’s good at it and he has to pay the mortgage.
As Hamlet would put it, there’s the rub, or one of the rubs, of Thank You for Smoking — the fact that all sorts of people have to do nasty things to pay the mortgage. That’s kind of a fact of life. But the movie doesn’t take the issue very far. It’s not going to consider the inherent capitalist iniquity that eventually makes wage slaves of us all; it’s interested, rather, in the difficulties faced by a particular person trying to justify his job. The reason why smoking was ever glamorous is dealt with only briefly, and mostly through hilarious cameo from Rob Lowe as a Hollywood agent.
And there’s the other rub of Thank You for Smoking: there’s no question in anyone’s mind, nor is there meant to be any question in our minds, that smoking is bad and that promoting it is wrong. Hence what seems at first an interesting moral dilemma is in fact very simple, as the movie chooses to present it. It offers no real moral conflict at all, which removes an entire layer of interest from the narrative.
But perhaps expecting moral complexity is asking too much. Despite the fact that it is much funnier than most movies going as comedies, and is indeed an enjoyable watching experience all round, Thank You for Smoking ends up being less edgy than it at first appears to be. Ultimately, as if drawn inexorably into a set of pre-existing clichés, it plumps for the conventional emotional resolutions.
This happens in the part of the story dealing with Nick’s son, played by Cameron Bright, who looks like he should have been in The Omen. But don’t expect fulfilment of any hopes that he might summon his satanic powers and give the movie a supernatural fillip. What’s at issue here is a son’s hero-worship of his father and what that means when dad has such a bad-guy job. Bravely, Thank You for Smoking does not submit Nick Naylor to an unconvincing last-minute change of heart, or not quite, but when it comes to the kid it’s all mush. It doesn’t inhale.