Thank You for Smoking

"Thank You for Smoking" leaves the kind of bitter taste in your mouth that cigarettes do. In its conception of the world everyone's either a sap or a douche bag. It's libertarianism taken to an extreme--a moral vacuum wherein nobody's to be trusted. Its depiction of lobbyists as insidious, amoral spinners is warranted--making them agents of big tobacco, to boot, is almost a cheap shot. And so is turning their opponent, a well-meaning Vermont senator (William H. Macy), into an impotent prig--by the film's end, he wants to digitally remove cigarettes from old movies and replace them with coffee mugs and candy canes. I suppose that counts as satire, but come on... It's more of a jab at Spielberg's flashlights-for-guns swap in his re-release of "E.T." than the liberal politicians whose views the filmmakers (and novelist Christopher Buckley)--ironically--see as arrogant. That today's general public would buy the B.S. that the spin doctor sells about cigarettes' "positive attributes" is something that I can't buy; the movie, however, takes it for granted that they would and do. Even though the film is clever and lively, it's also farfetched, manipulative and--politics aside--too damn smug. When I agreed with some of the points it made, it made me feel kind of like a douche bag, too.