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The plot, taken from Christopher Buckley's novel, follows Nick Naylor, Tobacco Industry Lobbyist (Aaron Eckhart), on his quest to keep cigarette legal and unregulated. He reports to BR (J.K. Simmons), the domineering head of the Institute for the Study of Tobacco, and "Captain" Doak Boykin (Robert Duvall), a courtly but steel-willed tobacco magnate. His nemesis is crusading Vermont senator Ortolan Finistirre (William H. Macy). In the meantime, he tries to be a good weekend dad to his son Joey (Cameron Bright), co-operate (and then some) with a pretty newspaper reporter (Katie Holmes), and hangs out with his fellow "Merchants of Death": Alcohol lobbyist Polly Bailey (Maria Bello) and gun-industry spokesman Bobby Jay Bliss (David Koechner). His world is turned upside down when he is kidnapped and plastered with a hugely excessive amount of nicotine patches: He survives, but is told that his next cigarette could kill him.

This is meant to be ironic - he's trying to convince Congress not to pass a law marking cigarettes as poison, but his own life is a perfect counter-example! Unfortunately, Reitman has decided to be clever. One aspect of this cleverness is that he never shows anybody actually handling a lit cigarette. For example, when Nick describes how movies made smoking cool in the first half of the twentieth century, he has to explain it, rather than show it visually. We're given the impression that his quitting is no big deal, because we haven't seen him light up before. It's not just easier, but it means that we don't see Nick viscerally confronting his own hypocrisy. Instead, we just see him feeling vaguely guilty about the example he's setting for his son.

There's two big problems with this approach: First, it requires him to have signs of a conscience way too early for us to enjoy Naylor's slimy amorality as satire or black comedy. Second, it requires a whole lot more use of Cameron Bright than anyone who likes kids should be subjected to. Bright's specialty, for those who haven't had Birth or Ultraviolet inflicted upon them, is the young boy who acts nothing like any child one is likely to encounter in real life. Here, he's one of those kids that uses psychological talk with his parents which is just not precious at all. How are we supposed to care if he loses his innocence when he's already an expressionless kid using grown-up words?

So there, we see that Reitman has blunted a lot of the impact that the story can have, both dramatically and comedically. Which is a crying shame, because it's full of fun comedic performances. Koechner has fun as the gun-nut gun lobbyist, and Rob Lowe's got a nice, fast-talking sequence as a Hollywood agent that Nick feels he could learn from. J.K. Simmons bellows well as BR, and William H. Macy is entertainingly prickly as the senator. On a more serious note, Sam Elliott is nicely dour as Lorne Lutch, a former Marlboro Man dying of lung cancer. It's a shame Katie Holmes is such a non-entity as reporter Heather Holloway.

Reitman gives them a lot of jokes to work with, and keeps the pace fast enough that the audience won't notice that not many of the jokes are hitting. Nick narrates, and will happily jump onto tangents at any moment. These tangents are the best parts of the movie, because they're not as involved in plot or character development, and thus there's no need to create sympathy or motivation. It's okay to be mean during an aside, and that's where the blackest (and funniest) comedy happens. The movie doesn't quite grind to an unfunny halt when it tries to actually tell the story, but it seems to get a lot more careful.

And a lot less fun. The moments where "Thank You" cuts loose are fantastic, but there's far too much mediocre movie in between.

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originally posted: 05/23/06 23:46:14
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