Thank you for mocking

Let me start off by saying that Thank You For Smoking is a good movie and I think you should go see it. (Yes, that means you.)

However, I think I would've enjoyed it more had I not just read the book. Yes, as the trailers claim, the movie is based on a bestselling book -- a very funny book, written by Christopher Buckley. Josh read it about a year ago, and I finally got around to reading it last weekend. Great satire, really witty, sharp, and intelligent. Willing to treat the reader as intelligent, too. And what a great protagonist Buckley created in Nick Naylor, the tobacco lobbyist's main spokesman - smart and sexy, if a bit loose on the whole morality thing. The plot is well-paced, filling in the reader in the right places, keeping Nick on his toes. You root for him even though you know he should know better.

Hmm...maybe I should have said "I think you should read this book" instead... ;)

At any rate, the movie is good too. Aaron Eckhart is well-cast as Nick (and hey, he's from Cupertino!), with a wide, open smile that makes you want to trust him even as he's screwing you over. The whole cast, in fact, is good, even (can it be true?) Katie Holmes as a seductive investigative reporter. Adam Brody and Rob Lowe are only onscreen briefly as two cogs in the machinery of the Los Angeles film industry, but their performances are memorable and entertaining. So it wasn't the acting that was lacking the magic of the book. It was the plot.

The plot in the book is intricate, a conspiracy operating on several levels, and a real page-turner as Nick churns to find out who is responsible for some of the things going wrong in his life. The plot in the movie is a bit dumbed down, with whole chunks removed - most likely for length, but there's something meaningful lost in all those extra pages.

What really irked me (and this may be more my personal taste than a flaw in the movie, since Josh disagreed) was the increased role of Nick's son in the movie. In the book, his son appears briefly, but he's hardly the focus of Nick's thoughts. In the movie, he becomes a central figure, shadowing Nick for much of the film, an eventual catalyst for Nick's moral transformation into a nice upstanding character.

Throughout the movie, though, I kept feeling that the film people had shoehorned the kid in there. Why? To humanize Nick, get us to see he isn't such a bad guy, get him to see there's more to life than shilling cigarettes. In my opinion, however, Nick needed no help. He didn't need a "gee whiz, what have I been doing?" moment of epiphany to see he was going down the wrong path. He knew all along he wasn't exactly on the up-and-up, morality-wise. So did the audience.

My point is, the book treats me as if I'm smart enough to know that Nick is human and smoking is bad, even if I'm not hit over the head with a big sign proclaiming that in blinking block letters. And I like that. The movie just didn't trust my intelligence enough to do the same (but you should still watch it anyway, particularly if you haven't read the book).