Spin Doctor: 'THANK YOU FOR SMOKING'.

Does it ever seem to you, when you spy those lonely cigarette smokers puffing away outside offices, or sip the crystalline air in a bar, that overnight we have awakened to a post-tobacco world? Jason Reitman's Thank You for Smoking takes us back before the epic lawsuit settlement of 1998, to the last moment of Big Tobacco's dominion, when the industry boasted a near-perfect record of beating lawsuits, promoted pseudo-science through its notorious Tobacco Institute, and kept Washington subdued with an army of image polishers and influence purchasers. Reitman's merry satire--based on a mischievous book of the same name by Christopher Buckley--portrays one such industry foot soldier, a handsome and irrepressible lobbyist named Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart). Christened "the Sultan of Spin" by the media, Naylor eagerly plays the villain opposite a cancer sufferer on a TV talk show, or visits a school on "What Do You Do Day," where he dismantles a third-grader who reports that her mommy says smoking is bad. "Is your mommy a doctor?" he sweetly inquires. "A scientific researcher of some kind? Well, then she's hardly a credible expert, is she?"

Ostensibly about cigarettes, the satire has in its crosshairs cynicism itself: "I have a moral flexibility," Naylor euphemizes, describing himself, "that goes beyond most people." Shrewdly Reitman joins this cynicism to the classic can-do personality of boundless energy, optimism, and personal charm. Naylor's sunny outlook, painted over dark Machiavel-lianism, makes for a total moral disconnect, but one that seems less a matter of calculation than temperament: he represents the lobbyist as supreme Darwinian adaptation to the American political system. Asked why he decided to spend his career defending evil, he answers with a stock phrase, "Everyone's got a mortgage to pay." But we understand his real motivation--namely, a love of contention, an addiction to winning arguments through rhetorical sophistry. "The man's a genius," moans an aide to Naylor's nemesis, Vermont Senator Ortolan Finistirre (William Macy). "He could disprove gravity." And Nick himself, in breezy voice-over: "Michael Jordan plays ball, Charles Manson kills people. I talk. Everyone has a talent."

Thank you for Smoking makes a nice counterpart to The Insider, Michael Mann's darkly conspiratorial 1999 drama of an industry whistleblower who risks his livelihood (and his life) to get the truth out. Reitman works from the other side, portraying a man whose livelihood depends on keeping the truth hidden. To Mann's mix of crusading outrage and sleek suspense he poses a chirpy, uptempo satire that skewers not the tobacco industry's sinister complicity, but its comical absurdity. The film hits the ground chuckling, with a title sequence incorporating the colorful designs of cigarette packs, and Tex Williams's fast-talking monologue on "Smoke, Smoke, Smoke That Cigarette!" summoning yesteryear's playful take on the national vice. There's black humor aplenty at every turn. Naylor shares a regular steakhouse lunch with two fellow lobbyists, one for the alcohol industry, the other firearms; calling themselves the MOD Squad--"Merchants of Death"--they argue over which of their products causes the most harm (and thus presents the biggest PR challenge).

Reitman provides a desultory plot; Nick dreams up a product-placement scheme to "put the sex back into cigarettes," and trots off to Hollywood to make it happen. Comic set pieces present a wacked-out, visionary movie exec (Rob Lowe), who offers Brad Pitt and Catherine Zeta-Jones lighting up in bed for a mere $25 million, and the Captain (Robert Duvall), last of the great southern tobacco planters, dishing out rides on his private jet, Tobacco One. Eventually, Naylor's mission bites him back, as he becomes erotically involved with the one person in Washington more amoral than himself, a sexy investigative journalist (Katie Holmes) who seduces him and then exposes key industry secrets, leaving his career, well, in ashes.

Along the way, he faces a daunting personal challenge. How can you serve as the sultan of spin, peddling cancer to America, and be a role model to your twelve-year-old son? Well, one way is to train him to follow in your footsteps. There exists no right or wrong, Naylor tells his boy, only better arguments and weaker ones. In a crowded restaurant he demonstrates his method, inviting his son to try proving that chocolate ice cream is better than vanilla, then quickly rerouting the argument into a ringing defense of freedom of choice and the American way. But that's not what I was saying, his son insists. Naylor nods toward people in the crowded place. "It's not you I'm after," he says. "It's them."

The moment focuses the crux of Naylor's corruption, and of America's problem: that a person with a gift for glibness can talk his way around any kind of moral claim; and that such a person, trained in marketing and set loose to roam the corridors of power, may represent a walking public-health calamity. Yet Reitman seems to step back from the darker implications. His satiric evenhandedness casts the do-gooders on the tobacco issue as even more hateful, exemplified by the smarmy and repulsive Senator Finistirre, whose methods are every bit as cynical as Naylor's ("When you get a cancer kid on a TV show," he thunders at an aide, "he should be helpless!"). Reitman seems to suggest that aims don't matter; it's all about the process. He prefers an honest nihilist to a smarmy idealist. But do we?

Thank You for Smoking is funny, in a way that makes you a little nervous. Reitman likes Naylor, and gets us to like him too, and our affection risks muddling the satire. The use of irony to undercut all claims to value is a signature development of the last quarter-century of American life, and it is arguable that such irony, cynically deployed in the person of various marketing and PR geniuses, has all but obliterated the connection to reality altogether. Are we supposed to feel appalled admiration for someone so relentlessly on message, so seamlessly cynical, that it's, well, funny? Reitman is a little more charmed by Naylor's audacity than is good for his movie--or for America.

You keep hoping to reach some stable bottom, some place where Naylor can be made to feel appalled at himself. But the film doesn't give it to him, or to us. We're left with something a little bit strange, a satire increasingly sympathetic to its villain, as if Reitman warmed to the very shamelessness of the man. Thank You for Smoking unloads its best punch, but at the end, it's Naylor who's still standing. The film has a sharp bite but a mellow aftertaste, too smooth by half. One wishes a little bit less of the nasty stuff had been filtered out.

Let me close with a glance back at this year's Oscars, where smaller films gratifyingly dominated the Best Picture category, with a winner, Crash, whose entire four-month run earned less than the winner of two years ago (Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King) earned on its opening weekend. Alas, I thought Crash, though smartly edited and crisply acted, was a bad movie, didactic behind its meretricious dazzle. The film, a study of characters linked by difficult events over two days in Los Angeles, peddles a spurious conception of human complexity--namely, that not only do we all have potential for good and for evil, but we are, in fact, angelic and evil, in rapid succession. Mixed motives make rich terrain for a filmmaker, but writer-director Paul Haggis turned Crash into a narrative parlor trick, flipping his characters 180 degrees in an instant, cheating realism in order to deliver high-concept dramatic reversals and lessons on racism.

If you want a truly subtle cinematic treatment of complex human intentions, I would recommend another L.A. film, one excluded entirely from the Oscar fun--Rodrigo Garcia's Nine Lives, a collection of vignettes, each consisting of a single Steadicam take of about a dozen minutes, capturing the lives of nine women facing poignant situations of love and loss. Garcia is the son of novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and perhaps that explains the unusually literary quality of these mini-movies, each of which has the power, subtlety, tension, and suggestiveness of a perfect short story. Where Haggis set out to make a movie about us all, Garcia remembers that the artist begins by paying attention to each one of us.