|
|
|
|
 |
indulge
in some quiet time |
. |
|
|||||||
copyright ©1999-2006 |
Plot synopsis Nick Naylor loves his job. He also happens to be really, really good at it. All this might be admirable – if it weren’t the fact that Nick’s job, in the eyes of anybody with, oh, a soul, is pretty much evil incarnate. Nick, see, is the American tobacco industry’s top lobbyist, which means he spends his time and energy actively promoting cigarette smoking and protecting the sneaky tactics of the country’s tobacco companies, in blatant disregard of the fact that the health consequences of smoking have been well documented. Nick’s so good at spinning his arguments that he can make health watchgroups, doctors and lung cancer patients look like the dupes, and paint his employers as the poor victims in a government conspiracy to limit the personal freedom of Americans. That most folks disapprove of his profession doesn’t bother him a bit; he’s got a couple of like-minds he hangs out with on a regular basis, Polly Bailey and Bobby Jay Bliss, who happen to be an alcohol lobbyist and a firearms lobbyist respectably (the reviled three refer to themselves as the MOD squad, short for Merchants of Death). Still, moral flexibility aside, Nick isn’t all that terrible a guy. He genuinely loves his pre-pubescent son Joey, and does a mostly decent job of teaching the kid how to think for himself; he makes a real effort to bond with him. It’s an attempt to do this last that he ends up bringing Joey along with him to California as he prepares to launch his latest tactic towards making cigarette smoking seem more positive: getting Hollywood involved and sneaking in some good ol’ product placement. It looks like Nick’s on his way to scoring another victory for big tobacco, until he finds himself getting involved with an ambitious and rather fetching young journalist named Heather Holloway. Review By now we’ve all had this simplistic message hammered into our brains: Cigarettes kill. Tobacco companies bad. So it’s a weird thing to find yourself kinda sorta rooting for the too-slick tobacco lobbyist, but as protagonist Nick Naylor, Aaron Eckhart is so good that you can’t help finding yourself getting more than a little sucked in by his charm. He’s so clearly having a grand old time delivering Nick’s twisted-genius arguments, and it’s impossible to imagine the role could have been any better cast. By movie’s end, Eckhart actually manages to make Nick seem like the hero (relatively speaking; this is a movie in which just about everyone comes off as completely self-serving). This -- combined with a strong script (adapted from a novel by Christopher Buckley) that ensures that the barbed jokes are equal-opportunity offenders that skewer politicians, the media, and righteous do-gooders alike -- means that the movie doesn’t end up being the scathing indictment of the tobacco industry that some folks might expect. In the end, Thank You For Smoking’s biting satire isn’t aimed so much at cigarettes and their makers, but rather at how hypocritical we all can be. And frankly, this makes for a whole lot more interesting viewing. Because, honestly, who doesn’t already know that the cigarette companies are evil? There’s been media coverage of that fact a-plenty. What Thank You for Smoking provides is something a whole lot harder to find: it’s deeply, snort-out-loud funny, effortlessly stylish, and very smart … fresh, snappy and just complete fun to watch.—reviewed by Yee-Fan Sun
---------------------------> lounge . nourish . host . laze . home . |
