Oracle Online

The film opens with Eckhart as a guest on the Joan Lunden Show sitting next to a bald young teenager referred to as Cancerboy. As the crowd heckles and spits at Eckhart, he smilingly declares that is in the best interests of the tobacco company that Cancerboy keep smoking, for if he dies, they will lose a customer.

So begins the wry and witty, yet breathtakingly tame film that takes a morally ambiguous stance on the choice to smoke. Although at points raucously satirical, Smoking owes a great deal to the weight pulled by the charismatic Eckhart, who elevates the film with his strikingly objective cockiness, which at points evokes a young candidate named Robert Redford.

Whether for good or bad, the film decides not to champion the work of tobacco advertising and spin control, but neither does it celebrate the anti-smoking cause.

In fact, it is the liberals who are portrayed as terroristic and crazy, at one point abducting Eckhart and pasting him down with Nicorette patches, an incident he only survives because his body is used to nicotine.

Naylor’s main opponent is a Vermont senator, portrayed as dowdy and simplistic in the way that only William H. Macy can, who crusades to get a huge skull-and-cross-bones symbol plastered over every cigarette label.

In the end, almost everyone is a stereotypically-charged character, including the great Robert Duvall, a racist cigarette mogul who invented filters, and a powerful Hollywood agent played by Rob Lowe, who curiously appears to either be wearing blush or have been recently slapped.

Perhaps the greatest downfall of the film is a minor role played by Katie Holmes, who must have been mistakenly cast before she started dating Tom Cruise. I knew that subconsciously I had been brainwashed by the useless American media coverage of movie stars when suddenly I wondered what Tom was thinking while Aaron Eckhart copulated with Katie Holmes. I started wondering if he chastised his new ingenue for her small role that mainly consisted of appearing in various states of undress, until I realized that I don’t care.

Instead I resorted to making small grunting noises every time she talked and felt that her mere presence made me want to smoke.

But, to the credit of the film, Sam Elliott stars as a retired Marlboro Man now dying of lung cancer and pissed as hell. Also is the ever-entertaining Maria Bello (The Cooler, A History of Violence) and Reno 911 star David Koechner as Eckhart’s friends who make up the MOD squad (Merchants of Death), who are competitive lobbyists for liquor and firearms, respectively. They often sit at dinner and argue over whose products kill more people per year and whose products earns them the right to be punished by vigilante justice.

The film is a swift 92 minutes that seems to have the messages: “Don’t trust tobacco lobbyists” and “Katie Holmes grants new heights of boredom to the girl-next-door archetype;” which begs the question of how obvious each of these messages are.