KENNETH TURAN / Los Angeles Times | Posted: Thursday, April 6, 2006 7:00 pm
If you haven’t heard of Nick Naylor and aren’t quite sure who Aaron Eckhart is, “Thank You for Smoking” is going to change both situations once and for all.
Though he’s been excellent in “Erin Brockovich,” “In the Company of Men” and numerous other films, Eckhart has never had a role that suits his particular gifts as Nick Naylor, the outlandishly amoral public face of the tobacco industry who prides himself on being one of “the few people on this planet who know what it is to be truly despised.”
Naylor’s outlandish exploits make “Thank You for Smoking,” a very smart and funny movie directed by Jason Reitman, who also shrewdly adapted the screenplay from Christopher Buckley’s savagely satiric novel.
So savage, in fact, that Mel Gibson’s Icon Productions owned the book for almost a decade without figuring out a way to film it. Reitman, a successful creator of shorts and commercials, is the son of director Ivan Reitman, and his complete understanding of comedy has made “Thank You for Smoking” that rare film that actually has a sense of humor.
The film’s success is grounded in the film’s fealty to the novel’s raft of crazily comic but sadly believable characters, starting with the ultra-confident, gleefully glib, all but unfazable Mr. Naylor, the self-described Col. Sanders of nicotine.
As a man who actually enjoys defending the indefensible, Eckhart’s Naylor is one of the great talkers of his generation. Not just anyone could do his job, he tells his earnest 12-year-old son, Joey (Cameron Bright): “It requires a moral flexibility that goes beyond most people.”
Though the Joey scenario adds more sentiment than laughs, those are generated by the other people Naylor deals with in his so-called life, starting with the always entertaining fellow members of the Mod Squad.
These lunchtime companions, who enjoy referring to themselves as “merchants of death,” include Polly Bailey (Maria Bello), an alcohol lobbyist and spokeswoman for the Moderation Council, and Bobby Jay Bliss (David Koechner), a gun lobbyist and spokesman for SAFETY (the Society for the Advancement of Firearms and the Effective Training of Youth).
“Thank You for Smoking” is at its most amusing when Naylor’s boss, The Captain (Robert Duvall with a really thick accent), sends him out to dependable Hollywood, always a ripe subject for satire.
Naylor has two jobs in California. He has to offer a large sum of money to cowboy Lorne Lutch (Sam Elliott), the erstwhile Tumbleweed Man whose “Lasso Some Flavor” ads made him the living icon of tobacco — until he went public with his inconvenient fight against lung cancer.
Naylor’s other job is more fun and only slightly less surreal. He gets to meet with super agent Jeff Megall (Rob Lowe), head of Entertainment Global, about a project that is close to Big Tobacco’s heart: getting the movies to make cigarette smoking sexy again.
One of the amusing conceits in “Thank You for Smoking” is that, except for clips such as John Wayne lighting up before taking a bullet in “The Sands of Iwo Jima,” no one actually smokes in the film. It’s an unexpected touch in an unexpectedly entertaining film.