"THANK
YOU FOR SMOKING" - DEATH OF A SALESMAN . . . ON CRACK
By
Erica Hector Vital
Red Rock Review
Las Vegas Round The Clock
http://www.lasvegasroundtheclock.com
ericavital@cox.net
ericav@theflickchicks.com
ericav@lasvegasroundtheclock.com
Academy of Tobacco Studies huckster Nick Naylor, played by a wide-jawed
Aaron Eckhart is a merciless hired gun, literally with the weapon still on
him and smoking, as he fends off the enemies of Big Tobacco, murderous
kidnappers, and the Marlboro Man in THANK YOU FOR SMOKING, the writing and
directorial debut of Jason Reitman, son of Ivan.
“You know the guy,” says Eckhart as the philosophically brutish Naylor, “who
can pick up any girl in the room. Well, that’s me . . . on crack. I’m that
guy.” Not only is Nick Naylor that guy, he is in many ways the bastard son
of capitalism, born of the embittered coupling of the American success story
and the hobbled manly spirits of John Wayne, Howard Hughes, and Willie Loman.
Nick Naylor knows himself better than any onscreen hero of recent years. Not
only is he an expert in the number of smoking related deaths per year,
475,000, but can continue to peddle the deadly product and defend these
numbers while still looking himself, and his twelve-year old,
impressionable son, Joey (Cameron Bright, GODSEND, THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT),
straight in the eye without blinking.
Eckhart’s Naylor is so self-possessed that he can out moralize a hostile
talkshow audience even as they swarm in an eighties feeding frenzy of
anti-smoking campaigns and slogans while truimphantly drawing a high five
from the cancer boy wheeled onstage to shame him. It is because Nick is such
a know-it-all that we wait for his undoing. At the same time we dread it.
Like his flawed literary and historical forebears, Bunyun, Loman,
Machiavelli, Nick’s fall is inevitable. In a smart, dialogue driven shell
game of where’s the villain, director Jason Reitman and writer Christopher
Buckley on whose book the film is based, throw a number of potential
character, and actual, assassins Nick’s way.
In Birkenstocks and rumpled suits, William H. Macy as anti-smoking proponent
Senator Ortolan Finistirre seems a likely candidate for Nick’s demise. For
the Senator, Nick and Big Tobacco are one in the same and he attacks both
the only way a buttoned up, eco-conscious, political terrier can, behind his
back and in the press. Other enemies are closer to home, beginning with BR,
Nick’s boss at the Academy of Tobacco Studies, played with oily brilliance
by J.K. Simmons who breathed an infuriating ferocity to the role of a
murderous Klansman on the HBO series OZ. Reprising the soft southern accent
of his roots, Robert Duvall is the sleeping giant of Big Tobacco, a
julep-sipping godfather figure whose penchant for mint and plantation life,
complete with brown-skinned service and white suits, speaks of the
malevolence lying at the root of the tobacco industry in particular, and
American industry as a whole. Hollywood itself presents as likely a nemesis
as an ally with Rob Lowe as a vampiric Lothario of movie wheeling and
dealing who offers up the smoking endorsements of Brad Pitt and
Zeta-Katherine Jones, as if he were selling their souls.
We are not surprised when the chink in Nick’s armor proves to be the
feminine wiles of girl reporter Heather Holloway, Katie Holmes. But we are
surprised by the twists and turns of satisfying narrative devices such as
Nick’s weekly bull sessions with a set of old friends who affectionately
refer to themselves as the MOD squad, with MOD being an acronym for
Merchants of Death. Eckhart is relaxed and shoots the b.s. with the charm of
a conman, fully engaged in the con. The sensual Maria Bello and the
sinisterly jocular David Koechner are a liquor lobbyist and a gun lobbyist,
respectively, and are Eckhart’s equals in shamelessness and brass balls. Sam
Elliot is the Marlboro Man thrust out of the mythic American landscape and
into the more tragic, mortal reality. Kim Dickens is the ex-wife who serves
as Nick’s surprising moral compass.
A scathing and surprisingly loving, comic indictment of the American
hero/huckster.
