Saturday 27 December 2014

A revealing smoke screen

Thank You for Smoking
Can the king of spin be a responsible father too? Aaron Eckhart as Nick Taylor, with Cameron Bright as his son, Joey, in 'Thank You for Smoking'More pictures 

Catherine Shoard reviews Thank You for Smoking and An Unfinished Life

Some rules are not meant to be broken. In Hollywood, you get rapped on the knuckles for just touching them. Mainstream movie-making adheres to a strict rule-book. The best friend is always less pretty. The mobile phone never works in the wood where the axe-murderer lurks. And few films score more feelgood points than a fist-pumping drama in which a plucky everyman or everywoman (and, if the latter, ideally a bit of a hottie) outsmarts the fat cats. From Mr Smith Goes toWashington (1939) to Erin Brockovich (2000) and Good Night, and Good Luck (2005), they all carry the same message: corporate society is at odds with the American dream. Innumerable documentarians (Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock, Robert Greenwood) are on hand to back them up. Together, they form a chorus line of shouty liberals, all knee-jerking in time.

ThankYou for Smoking (15), directed by first-timer Jason Reitman, based on the book by Christopher Buckley, is different. It rethinks things from the ground up. Our hero here is not a plucky single mom battling the bad guys but a plucky bad guy battling the forces of good. Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart) is a lobbyist for the tobacco industry. He's the public face of cigarettes. He's good-looking and charismatic, and he's our narrator.' I have Bachelors in kicking ass and taking names,' he explains.'You know the guy who can pick up any girl? I'm him.On crack.' Nick can win over cancer-ridden children on chat shows. He makes news anchors laugh. He runs rings round a Senator (William H. Macy), who wants every cigarette packet to carry a skull-and-crossbones logo.

He's the king of spin - the envy of his line manager (J.K. Simmons), a surrogate son to his wheezy boss (Robert Duvall). He has a brainwave: make fags fashionable again by getting them back on the big screen:' We need a smoking role model. A real winner. Indiana Jones meets Jerry Maguire. On two packs a day.'

So he jets off to LA for a pow-wow with a top movie agent, Jeff (Rob Lowe), taking his 12-year-old son, Joey (Cameron Bright), along for the ride. He also has a run-in with a militant anti-tobacco activist, a happy few nights with a sexy investigative reporter, Heather (Katie Holmes), and a tricky afternoon with the original Marlboro Man, now noisily dying of cancer.

The Nick/Jeff meetings, mostly spent costing a sex scene between Brad Pitt and Catherine Zeta-Jones in which they would both post-coitally light up, are superb. Likewise the cackling power lunches between Nick and the PRs for the firearms and alcohol industries. But Thank You for Smoking is not just a flip, sick bit of fluff. It's also serious, brave, even. It tackles issues of culpability and self-deceit familiar to everyone. Can Nick square his job with being a responsible father? And how does he cope with his conscience?

Well, for a start, by seeing things philosophically. His job is not about telling the truth; it's about helping people to find it. All he's doing is putting across one point of view - 'The beauty of argument is that if you argue correctly, you're never wrong.' It's also, as he tells his son, crucial to the Constitution. How can you have free debate if you haven't equipped both sides with the best possible advocates?

It's hard not to be persuaded.What's wrong with a certain moral elasticity, anyway? Moral inflexibility doesn't sound so great.And isn't forbidding your citizens from doing something they know full well is dangerous exactly the kind of nannystate paternalism the founding fathers wanted to get away from?

Plus, it's just a job. Nick is good at it, and it pays well. The key moment of the whole film comes during his interview with Heather - he leans over, turns off her tape recorder and says, 'Everybody's got to pay the mortgage.'

It's a line that runs right through - a stock excuse, but not necessarily the lesser for it. Are those who condemn people working for undesirable activities really superior? What if they have, say, pensions invested in arms companies, or wear trainers made with child labour?

These are highly unusual ideas for a mainstream movie to raise, especially one so easy to watch. Much of the praise must go to Eckhart, who somehow manages to make his character confident without seeming cocky. Nick is a refinement of Chad, the cynical smoothie Eckhart played in Neil LaBute's In the Company of Men (1997), as well as a sort of evil twin to George, the relaxed biker boyfriend in Erin Brockovich. (Eckhart also, you may remember, starred in a recent stage production of David Mamet's Oleanna - another of those rare dramas that isn't afraid to let you see both sides.)

Katie Holmes is the only weak link here; as a hard-nosed hack she looks like a pushover, no match for Nick, in either sense. It seems implausible that he could be dim enough to spill his secrets to her. There are other problems, too, such as the way it sidesteps passive smoking. Strangest of all the flaws, though, is that - despite Nick being a 60-a-day man - not a single cigarette is lit in the whole film.

Why? Could it be that, as Jeff says, the only people who smoke in movies these days are psychopaths and Europeans? Perhaps the producers didn't want to rock the boat too much. After all, everybody's got to pay the mortgage.

Sometimes, though, you might rather fancy a film that sticks to the rules. If so, look no further than An Unfinished Life (12A), a film that follows the Hollywood textbook so closely it's practically a diagram.Adapted from Mark Spragg's tearjerker, it's directed by Lasse Hallström, the world's No 1 expert in taking books (Chocolat,The Shipping News) and dunking them in treacle.

Robert Redford plays a grizzly Wyoming rancher still mourning the death of his son in a car accident a decade before. His wife has upped sticks; his only pal is ex-farmhand Morgan Freeman, now crippled after a run-in with a bear.

Enter J-Lo, plus her 11-year-old daughter. She's the estranged daughter-inlaw of Redford, and she's seeking refuge from her abusive boyfriend (Damien Lewis). At first grandad is hostile. But, over time, prodded by the heart-melting antics of his granddaughter, and the sage advice of Freeman, Redford defrosts and he and J-Lo can get on with the bonding.

It is possible to have quite a jolly time watching An Unfinished Life, in the way you might watching a panto. That seems to have been the inspiration for much of the script and characterisation, anyhow.

Lewis gives us a baddie so broad you have to suppress the hisses. He smokes, he swears, he sneers. He hunts down J-Lo and says he's sorry he hit her, it's just that sometimes she makes him so goddamn mad!

Luckily Redford is on hand to teach him - and the impressionable youngster - that violence will not be tolerated.How? By beating him to a pulp.

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