|
COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
Cigarette smoking naturally turns many of us into frothing moralists. How can we tolerate an industry, we ask, that glamorizes poison? That's the kind of sentiment that gets carved up into little pieces by Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart), the hero of "Thank You for Smoking." The chief spokesman for the tobacco lobby in Washington, Nick is a mixture of swagger and impudent candor. He knows that his arguments in favor of smoking are rubbish, but he enjoys the game of spin too much to give it up. As he explains to his young son, Joey (Cameron Bright), in this line of work the goal is not to be right but to dominate the conversation. If you put your opponent on the defensive, if you drown his claims with "facts" of your own, you will win the media battle. Adapting Christopher Buckley's satirical 1994 novel, Jason Reitman (the son of the director and producer Ivan Reitman) maintains a juicily ambiguous tone. Nick sells an addictive pleasure with appeals to freedom of choice. He may have a point about personal responsibility (is there anyone left who doesn't yet know of smoking's dangers?), but he is also a master of such rhetorical shell games as the strategically selective lab report and the brazenly misleading syllogism. Nick is the intellectual equivalent of the golden-maned bruisers in professional wrestling--he's magnetically...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
