Thank You for Smoking (2005)

Thank You for Smoking arrived in 2005, a Jason Reitman debut adapted from Christopher Buckley's 1994 novel, with Aaron Eckhart gliding through Washington as the tobacco lobby's most polished mouthpiece. The film's target is the machinery of persuasion itself, and its sympathies sit with the persuader. That posture alone places it well outside the current moment. There is no reforming arc, no third-act conversion, no apology issued to the audience on behalf of the characters.

The ensemble is white and stays white, and race never enters the frame as a subject. Women hold professional posts, a lobbyist here, a reporter there, but the reporter is a seductive manipulator who sleeps with her subject to extract a confession, and the film offers no critique of the arrangement. No queer lives, no climate anxiety, no body-positive messaging, no neurodivergent characters, no reworking of the historical record. These absences are not oversights. They reflect a film made before that vocabulary was standard issue.

Corporate satire is present, though it bites and then declines to swallow. The tobacco men, the gun men, and the liquor men lunch together as the Merchants of Death, and the joke lands, but the film admires its hero's craft too much to indict the system that rewards it. The moral instruction, such as it is, concerns personal responsibility and the annoyance of being told how to live. Reitman delivers that through dry comedy instead of sermons, which keeps the proceedings watchable and keeps the preaching to a minimum. The result is a sharp, cynical entertainment that would need substantial renovation before it could pass inspection in the present climate.