The capital burns.(FILM)(Thank You for Smoking)(Movie review)

WASHINGTON is Hollywood for ugly people, the saying goes, which is probably why it's so hard for Hollywood to get Washington quite right: The two cities are like fraternal twins, similar but not quite the same, and the devil always lurks in the details. Filmmakers tend to take the nation's capital much too seriously (see, for instance, the limp cinema verite of HBO's K Street), succumb to Syriana-style conspiracy theorizing, or simply throw up their hands and produce chest-thumping left-wing agitprop like The West Wing or The Contender. As for comedy, the less said the better: You have to understand a place before you can satirize it, and so what passes for political satire is usually just a jokey premise--Chris Rock runs for president! Reese Witherspoon takes Capitol Hill!--with a few Barbra Streisand talking points thrown in for ballast.

Thank You for Smoking, an adaptation of Christopher Buckley's novel, is a cut above this sorry crop--not least because, well, it's an adaptation of a Christopher Buckley novel. The premise alone puts every previous D.C. comedy to shame: The film is a Lobbyist's Progress, with Big Tobacco shill Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart) smooth-talking his way through a neo-Puritan world. Eckhart has a shark's grin and the boyish smarm of a man who's spent his life getting away with murder; he's an idealized, sexed-up version of the inside-the-Beltway player--which is to say, the guy that Jack Abramoff and every other K Street wannabe desperately wanted to be. And he's up against a host of other idealized types: his glory-hogging boss (a bellowing J. K. Simmons), who made his bones in the hardscrabble world of cigarette vending machines; a goo-goo senator from Vermont (William H. Macy, doing his usual milquetoast bit) who wants to slap a death's head on cigarette packs; and a femme fatale investigative reporter, repeatedly described in the film as a busty bombshell and played, inexplicably, by Katie Holmes.

Throw in a deadpan Rob Lowe as a Hollywood superagent eager to put cigarettes back on the big screen ("Indiana Jones meets Jerry Maguire . . . on two packs a day"); Robert Duvall as a mintjulep-slurping tobacco baron who takes Naylor under his wing; Sam Elliott as the Marlboro Man, now dying of lung cancer and out for blood (or at least blood money); Naylor's "MOD squad" pals (as in "merchants of death") from the booze and firearms industries, who compare annual death tolls over power lunches; and you have a film that would have to work hard not to be funny. And while first-time director Jason Reitman (son of Ivan, of Stripes and Ghostbusters fame) has rejiggered the novel's narrative, he's wisely kept most of the best lines intact, while showing a flair for quick visual gags: Lowe's Japan-obsessed superagent decked out in a kimono during a late-night call; Naylor unconscious, covered in nicotine patches, and draped seminude over Abraham Lincoln's statue on the Washington Mall by anti-smoking fanatics.

The movie is so breezy, in fact, so charming and perfectly cast (the Holmes puzzler aside), and everyone seems to be ...