Some call him a merchant of death.\ Some call him a ""mass murderer."" Despite all this, someone calls him ""Dad"" and expects he will pay the bills and support his family.
It is this sense of moral ambivalence that makes the satire ""Thank You for Smoking"" less about the dangers of smoking than about the morality of spin and modern-day public relations.
The main character Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart) is a lobbyist for the Academy of Tobacco Studies, a research company founded by Big Tobacco that, as Naylor bluntly narrates, is paid to find inconclusive studies about tobacco use and use them to continue promoting it to people of all ages.
Naylor is the all-important subject of the film, along with his job selling and promoting a blatantly deadly product. While he spends much of the film weaving elaborate arguments relating tobacco use to parenting, education and most of all, to freedom and personal choice, a great deal of the plot revolves around his relationship with his precocious son, Joey (Cameron Bright).
While Naylor is not the typical icon of morality for young, impressionable minds, Eckhart manages to craft the character into an antihero trying to ""pay the mortgage"" and raise his family by doing what he does best. The fact that what he does best makes him a ""merchant of death"" in the eyes of many is a fact of life that Naylor, as the narrator of the film, manages to successfully spin to his own son, himself, and most of the time, the audience, who might find themselves rooting for Naylor in spite of their better judgment.
Maria Bello and David Koechner, as the lobbyists for alcohol and firearms, respectively, and Naylor's best friends in the film, are also phenomenal in their supporting roles. They flesh out the film's humor beyond Eckhart's one-man show.
The responses to tobacco critics that Nick crafts in the film, no matter how strained at times, also have the effect of revealing there is indeed more of a gray area to tobacco sales than many care to acknowledge, making the film thought provoking.
Although the film manages to successfully portray and satirize the moral ambiguities of spinning tobacco use in the realms of government and Hollywood, ""Thank You for Smoking"" disappointingly falls into the trap of simplifying the world of media relations.
Reitman portrays this world, juxtaposed most strongly by Naylor and reporter Heather Holloway (Katie Holmes), as a news-vs.-public relations dogfight that belies the complexity of these two professions in relation to each other. Holmes, whose character is responsible for Naylor's biggest personal public-relations troubles, is also not particularly convincing in the role, and her plotline is the most poorly written and incoherent of the film.
In spite of these smaller mistakes, ""Thank You for Smoking"" provides a valuable and humorous look into the lives of those who are morally repugnant to many and reveals the moral ambiguities that run rampant in modern life. As Naylor himself points out, the point of an argument is not always to prove the opposite of what your opponent thinks, but to prove that a conclusive answer may not exist in the first place. ""Thank You for Smoking"" as a whole follows this creed, managing to both poke fun at and reveal the hypocrisies of the everyday American culture, all from the perspective of one of its most amoral industries.
\
