Puff Love

It's hard to believe it's been almost a decade since Aaron Eckhart's red-hot debut as the ultimate misanthrope in Neil LeBute's ultimately misanthropic "In the Company of Men". In the last ten years, Mr. Eckhart has bounced around in some memorable supporting roles - most notably in "Erin Brockovich" - as well as some high-profile duds ("The Core", "Paycheck"). Finally, Mr. Eckhart lands the finest role of his career as Nick Naylor, a fast-talking tobacco lobbyist in Jason Reitman's pitch black satire "Thank You For Smoking".

Satire is hard to do well, but Mr. Reitman - who also wrote the screenplay based on the novel by Christopher Buckley - hits exactly the right tone from start to finish. It's an impressive feature-length writing/directing debut from the son of the man who brought us "Stripes" and "Ghostbusters". The younger Mr. Reitman shows more of a gift for the subtlety of satire than the broad comedy of his father's films.

"Smoking" is the kind of film in which a Hollywood "super-agent" (Rob Lowe) works for a company with the initials E.G.O. or in which the senator from the great state of Vermont (William H. Macy, always a pleasure) sits in front of a sculpture of his state made to look like a hunk of cheese.

There are too many knowing nods and winks throughout the film and half the fun is experiencing them yourself. With the exception of the unfortunate casting of Katie Holmes (who looks like a kid playing dress-up) as a frisky newspaper reporter, the cast is uniformly terrific. J.K. Simmons, in full J. Jonah Jameson mode, is on-hand as the blustery head of the Agency for Tobacco Studies; Sam Elliot, in the part he's been waiting for, plays the original Marlboro Man; and the mind-bogglingly wonderful Robert Duvall makes a memorable appearance as the mint julep-sipping "Captain".

If the film ever goes wrong it's in a sadly ironic way. There's a scene in which Mr. Eckhart's character is confronted with giving up smoking (don't worry, it's not done with heart-tugging violins underneath). While the scene is as sardonic as anything else in the film, it shines a spotlight on one undeniable hypocrisy: we've actually never seen Mr. Eckhart's character (or anyone else in the film for that matter) light up. No one smokes in "Thank You For Smoking".

Now I don't want to make too much of this because the movie is fantastic. But considering one of the key plot points involves Nick convincing Rob Lowe's aforementioned super-agent to introduce cigarettes back into mainstream Hollywood films (in one of many perfectly delivered impassioned arguments by the verbally-gifted Mr. Eckhart), isn't it a pity that the film needed to have it both ways?

Of course, I can't help thinking since no one at all smokes in the film, that it's possible I'm arriving at exactly the conclusion Mr. Reitman wants me to. It's possible he's pointedly saying, "hey look, I can't even have characters smoking in my own smoking satire." Then again, I might just be getting a little too "meta" for my own good. Either way, this is as much as I've had to think about any movie yet this year. And it feels good.