Thank You for Smoking

Jason Reitman’s first feature makes the technique of winning a lost argument its real subject. Mel Gibson’s Icon Productions bought the rights before the novel was published, and Gibson once saw himself as Naylor. Once Reitman found out who held the rights he wrote a draft nobody had asked for and won the company over. For 3 years financiers kept asking for a version in which Naylor repents and the story ends happily. Reitman would not deliver it, and the project sat. It was finally paid for by David Sacks, an investor who had sold his stake in PayPal. Acquiring the rights took him a year; it was his first film. Nobody smokes on screen. The only smoke comes from the old movies the characters watch, and even the tobacco patriarch played by Robert Duvall carries a drink instead. Christopher Buckley called the omission deliberate and rather cool. After the Toronto screening 2 distributors announced they had the film; Fox Searchlight kept it. It drew 2 Golden Globe nominations and no Academy Award nominations at all. A good fit if you treat the senate hearing, which Naylor wins by conceding that cigarettes kill, as the film’s central trick. Not for anyone waiting for the narrator to repent, since that is precisely what the director spent years refusing.