You Light Up My Life

Reviewed - Thank You for Smoking: Dripping with cynicism, the self-styled MOD Squad (Merchants of Death) in Thank You for Smoking are three lobbyists who regularly meet at the same restaurant table under a sign declaring: "Take pride in America. We have the best government money can buy."

All three relish the challenge of their jobs promoting products that kill their fellow Americans. One (Maria Bello) is selling alcohol, another peddles firearms, and Nick (Aaron Eckhart) staunchly defends the tobacco industry.

Our introduction to Nick is on a talk show where the debate seems loaded against him, with three anti-smoking activists and a 15-year-old former smoker who has cancer. Turning on the charm and playing to the camera, Nick twists the arguments and turns them in his favour.

There are more daunting challenges ahead for Nick. Hetakes on a Vermont senator (William H Macy) who wants cigarette packs emblazoned with a skull and crossbones and labelled "poison". He attempts to bribe a former Marlboro Man model (Sam Elliott) who has cancer. And he persuades a pretentious Hollywood agent (Rob Lowe) into getting mainstream movie stars to smoke on screen again, instead of the usual Russian and Arab villains.

Then there is the more delicate matter of how Nick reconciles his shameless manipulation as "the Colonel Sanders of nicotine" with the influence he has on his admiring 12-year-old son (Cameron Bright). It is a measure of Eckhart's perfectly judged performance, his strongest since he played another unscrupulous executive in In the Company of Men, that he sustains the movie through these difficult sequences.

Based on a novel by Christoper Buckley, Thank You for Smoking is directed with breezy assurance by Jason Reitman, who surrounds Eckhart with an exemplary cast - apart from Katie Holmes, who overplays an underwritten role as a muck-raking reporter. The movie's targets are generally obvious as it plays with spin, exploitation and political correctness, but it proves timely and entertaining, albeit lacking the sharper teeth of Sidney Lumet's angrier, prophetic Network.