Funny. Well-acted. Well-directed. Aaron Eckhart is not the angry, misogynistic asshole here that he did so incredibly well in The Company of Men. He’s a guy that wants to spend more time with his kid, and play the game that is his job really well.
It doesn’t matter to me if the people he works for are evil (or more blatantly cartoonishly evil than other companies that other people work for), or if he gets the conscience pangs that will make him renounce his past and work for cancer kids. He doesn’t, by the way. I don’t think I’m giving away much to say that this doesn’t turn into a sappy “I’ve Seen the Light!” kind of movie after 90 minutes black comedy.
But it’s not really even all that black to begin with – at least I don’t consider it to be. It’s even touching from time to time. Even when Nick (Eckhart) tries to pay off a dying cigarette spokesguy to stop badmouthing the industry, it manages to avoid the pitfalls on one side of sentimentality and on the other side of pure ruthlessness.
It’d be easy to take the film to task for portraying the cigarette marketing industry as a bumbling, fast-talking bunch of opportunists instead of the evil-hearted bastards trying to kill our parents and erase rainbows from the world. But in the end, this just made me laugh a lot, and it didn’t bore me at all. Sure, it’d be nice to see something with more teeth to it about how lobbyists are controlling our govt. and screwing over regular people. But it wouldn’t be very funny. (And if you want to see that, it’s a 3 hour documentary called The Corporation, and it’s fucking great.) But this is just a light comic satire. And it wasn’t perfect: The joke that is William H Macy isn’t funny anymore, and Maria Bello is too good to be wasted in such a small part. The audience reaction to Katie Holmes was to recoil and be creeped out, big-time, and I am predicting right here that Tom “Clear” Cruise’s MI3 will flop. They – and their careers – have had it.
Oh yeah – the music cues are great (mostly 60-year-old songs, like The Ink Spots), and the opening credits – animated blow-ups of old cigarette packaging – are downright beautiful.
Here’s my question: Is this movie not getting a full proper release? It’s only playing a few theaters here in L.A., and it’s not anywhere in the Top 10 this week. So what’s up? Is this playing in Minnesota / S.C. / or wherever the hell you people are? For what it’s worth, for 2 weeks now, Evert & Roeper have made this their pick for the single film to see this week, if you have to see one, and it’s gotten good to very good reviews. So why isn’t the studio stepping out here more?
It’s playing at a Landmark in Minneapolis even as we speak.
not yet playing in boulder or environs (it is playing at the landmark mayan in denver). but it will probably get here–i know i saw a preview for it a while back in a theater. regardless, i will probably watch this on dvd.
by the way, thank you mark, for our first new post in 8 days.
I saw a commercial for this film the other night (while watching “24” I think). Looks like its getting a national release on the 14th.
This film is, I assume (since it’s playing in Charleston) now getting full, proper release. I enjoyed it a great deal, and I agree with everything Mauer says. It strays neither to pure ruthlessness nor to sentimentality. And I think I have an idea of how the filmmakers manage this. This film is about the tobacco industry, but it’s also (perhaps even more so) about rhetoric. In fact, if anyone out there plans to teach a course on the history of rhetoric, or classical rhetoric, I’d throw this film on the syllabus. I haven’t read Buckley’s novel, but I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Reitman insisted on going with the novel’s strength, rather turning the screenplay into a straightforward attack on the tobacco industry.
Nick really has two addictions: nicotine and rhetoric. The former is not really explored (we never see him, nor anyone for that matter, smoking–though I may have missed something. The only time I remember seeing cigarette smoke was in the experiment with the lab rats). The focal point of this film is really on Nick’s other addiction: the thrill of making the weaker argument the stronger. And what could be a greater challenge? It’s accepted as fact, as God-given truth, that cigarettes kill.
There are a number of scenes that are not about smoking at all, but still fit in perfectly with the film precisely because, I think, this film is about Nick Naylor, Rhetorical Man. his main problem is not that he’s an asshole, a slimeball, a slick motherfucker who has no ethics. His problem is that he sees the world differently. The scene where he helps Joey with his homework illustrates this nicely. He basically give Joey a lesson in classical rhetoric. And by that I don’t mean he teaches his son the art of persuasion, or proper grammar or style (our modern understanding of rhetoric, thanks to English department idiots, doesn’t really go beyond this). He teaches him the axiom of rhetoric, which is that the truth exists only in its versions.
When Nick is visiting his son’s classroom, he does the same thing. He tries to tell the kids not to believe everything they hear. At this point in the film (very early on), we chuckle because we think he’s an evil tobacco lobbyist who sees no problem charming his way into the heart of potential customers. At one point, a little asks “so are you saying cigarettes are not bad for us?” The teacher interrupts and says “no, no…now wait…” Nick then stops the teacher and (I think with real sincerity) says “no, that’s not what I’m saying.” And it’s true: that isn’t what Nick is trying to say.
Stanley Fish, in his book Doing What Comes Naturally has a nifty essay on rhetoric in which he cites the Phaedrus: “an orator who knows nothing about good and evil undertakes to persuade a city in the same state of ignorance…by recommending evil as though it were good.” This is rhetoric seen from the philosopher’s point of view. But from another point of view, one that Hans Blumenberg writes about, human beings are creatures that live with a “certificate of poverty,” that live in a world in which evident truths are lacking. Anyone who believes that human beings have of wealth of evident truths would see the orator (and the poet) as a threat to a just society.
The age old battle between rhetoric and philosophy is well known, and it is played out here, in Thank You For Smoking, though instead it appears as the battle between lobbyists and journalists. Still, the battle is waged along the same lines as the classical one: the journalists (and politicians) see a lobbyist like Nick as standing for everything that is the antithesis of truth. For Nick, however, the antithesis of truth is, as Blumberg says, “superficial, because the rhetorical effect is not an alternative that one can choose instead of an insight that one could also have, but an alternative to a definitive evidence one cannot have, or cannot have yet, or at any rate cannot have here and now.” Rhetoric lives under the assumption that we have only provisional truths, and therefore (and more importantly), the effect of rhetoric is always transparent (Nick is as transparent as they get, whereas the Senator from Vermont is a hypocrite, the journalist is phony–and, I agree with Mauer here, just plain ooky). The lesson Nick gives the cell-phone lobbyists, not incidentally, is to reassert the axiom of rhetoric.
Richard Langham would say that Nick is homo rhetoricus:
But we do not live in the age of Rhetoric anymore–that golden age is gone. Homo rhetoricus is practically extinct. The few that are still around are vilified, ridiculed, and persecuted. They must gather together in support groups (the M.O.D. Squad). Their marriages fall apart and their children forsake them. They cannot survive in a world that takes itself so seriously. They are, as De Quincey writes, no match for “the stern tendencies of the age; and, if, by any peculiarity of taste or strong determination of the intellect, a rhetorician en grande costume were again to appear among us, it is certain that he would have no better welcome than a stare of surprise as a posturemaker or balancer, not more elevated in the general estimate, but far less amusing, than an acrobat, or funambulist, or equestrian gymnast.”
This film, as a lesson on classical rhetoric, is perfect. The film in and of itself, isn’t perfect. As Mauer says, the flaws are mostly in its casting. I agree, William H. Macy isn’t funny anymore. And hearing Katie Holmes say “fucking” is creepy to say the least. Can’t really understand why Nick is so attracted to her.
But the filmmaking itself is excellent. The voice-over narration is well-written and effective (it draws us into Nick’s way of seeing things, which is really what this film is about). Robert Duvall is a delight, and Cameron Bright–at first embarrassed by his dad, then in total amazement and wonder–is very good, never too sweet or sad. Visually a beautiful film. It’s nice to see filmmakers err on the side of trying to make every shot interesting. I’m still puzzled as to why Holmes was cast–though maybe someone more sympathetic, someone grounded in reality, would have undermined the film’s defense of rhetoric.
nice
I didn’t enjoy this. Over the last couple days, wondering why, I touched on things the affirmations above already note–while never copping out, the film does seem to pull its strongest, blackest punches; there are some missteps–and I wondered why, given the smart readings above, I didn’t engage. I’ll go ahead and stipulate: the film was smart. Many of the actors were fine, if not strong, even if a few felt stiff or stereotypical. The film avoids learning lessons, or simply sticks to its guns about rhetoric, which I respect…
… but I never enjoyed. Key word, that; for all the praise I want to throw at Smoking for its intelligence and style, I found it almost an exercise in making a good black comedy, rather than a good black comedy. I’ll contrast Eckhart here with his role in In the Company of Men. Certainly the latter film affords him room to sink deep into the inexcusable, and he wallows in the muck–as does the film. Smoking is trying to make a harder kind of product, one which never loses its steely edge yet also (as Mark noted) resists the simplicity of certain all-deriding forms of irony. But in Men Eckhart’s smile seems a dangerous, lovely thing–the beauty of the performance is not solely in its taking of no prisoners, it’s in the actor’s transmittal of something approaching pure, devious pleasure in the bad behavior. Whereas–perhaps as a kind of rhetorical man, following John’s argument–in Smoking the pleasure is often confused, lost. When he has his own firm and smiles at the end, arguing about cellphones now, I felt distanced from that pleasure, as if he was smiling at me; in Men I kept feeling drawn in, as if he was trying to seduce me, to get me to smile along. I did. When his reptilian character exposes his fraud to the woman in the film, he barks out a laugh–as if it was a lark, this viciousness. I recall laughing out loud, too. That film caught me up in the bad behavior; Smoking suffers from the judgmental distance of satire, in that I never felt myself the object of the leer, nor felt at all compelled to identify with the leer. It was an examination of such a character, rather than getting me sucked in.
That’s kind of tangled, tortured logic–but it’s why I liked the film far less than I’d expected.
i am tempted to say to mike* that i would buy his argument if not for the casting of eckhart, that to cast eckhart is to bank a certain amount of audience identification and connection, allowing us to read past the character and connect with the persona; i’m sure that we can see that the cast and the direction run perpendicular to (i.e., against, for you humanities types) the superior detachment he sees. but i’m not petty like that.
we watched it last night. very entertaining indeed. unlike mike, i enjoyed it a lot, but agree that the film pulls its strongest punches. it isn’t that big tobacco gets off easy–it doesn’t–or that the film suggests an equivalence between their brand of sliminess and that of political opportunists campaigning against them. it is that the protagonist is not very complex, though we get the occasional hint. the film is not willing to commit to making naylor difficult to like. on the one hand, there’s his employers but his talking on behalf of them is funny and self-conscious and so gets us on his side–we know he doesn’t mean it and so we mock the losers in the film who get apoplectic thinking he does. on the other hand, we see all his moments of slight doubt (with his son, with sam elliott) which serve to humanize him. and the holmes character is there to hint at his vulnerability behind the mouth: she’s not particularly engaging but she’s willing to listen and so he blabs it all away. in other words, naylor is likeable not just because of the seduction of his mouth, but for other more conventional reasons (though to the film’s credit it doesn’t go down the easy moralizing, psychologizing route). he doesn’t learn anything but he’s not a bad guy either. he should have been more of a bastard and still not learnt anything.
* comment 15
Footnotes, eh? I believe I can do that*, too.
*Comment 39