For a movie which has such an incredulous title, ‘Thank you for smoking’ is almost in justification, rollickingly hilarious. It turns out to be a movie that almost extols the ‘gift of the gab’, a movie that brings such a nonchalant perspective to issues that trigger profoundly ethical discussions and are usually complicated unnecessarily, and a movie that seeks to light heartedly yet intelligently rationalize the means taken by different people to make their living or to put it as in the movie ‘to pay their mortgages’.
Nick Naylor(Aaron Eckhart) is a man who self admittedly makes money by talking. He is a lobbyist for the ridiculously named Academy of Tobacco studies, a consortium of tobacco manufacturers, where research is done solely with the capitalistic aim of disproving the health hazards of cigarettes. He smooth talks, oozes confidence, corners social activists, and helps keep the market for tobacco growing. The movie takes a tongue-in-cheek look at how governments make it incumbent upon themselves to parent cigarette smokers and make absurd regulations like the pointless statutory warning that accompanies ever cigarette label. In my opinion, government regulations against things like smoking and suicide are nothing but an intrusion into the privacy and personal preferences of people. Why do politicians and social activists try desperately to offer help to people who do not need any, and whose actions have a consequence on nobody but themselves. For instance, trying to police people on passive smoking, which harms others is a far more fruitful and sensible exercise than trying to educate fully aware people on the perils of smoking. I can go on in all earnestness and seriousness about this issue, but I would be doing immense injustice to the movie which makes no such attempts at taking stands, or defending the morality and ethics of people who work for the tobacco industry.
‘Thank you for smoking’ merely glazes the surface of deep issues, letting you draw conclusions, and in the true spirit of its message allows you to make for yourself the decision of what is right and what is wrong, or rather whether everything in life necessitates such a classification. There is sharp wit and wry humour in the dialogues and the scene where Nick engages his son in an argument which he proceeds to “win” by heading off in a totally tangential direction, had me chuckling to myself, for I have attempted to pull that on my friends many a time. And in a movie that was largely funny and pleasantly non-preachy, the end had two brilliantly directed moments- one where Nick is asked in the senate hearing whether he would let his son smoke when he turns 21 and the other where the almost reassuring fact that there are still many things in this world that money cannot buy, is subtly emphasized.
I had a great time watching this movie and I would rate it a must see. Go ahead and watch it and you wouldn’t regret it!
