FILM

THANK YOU FOR SMOKING:
Cigarette smoking naturally turns many of us into frothing moralists. How can we tolerate an industry, we ask, that glamorizes poison? That’s the kind of sentiment that gets carved up into little pieces by Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart), the hero of “Thank You for Smoking.” The chief spokesman for the tobacco lobby in Washington, Nick is a mixture of swagger and impudent candor. He knows that his arguments in favor of smoking are rubbish, but he enjoys the game of spin too much to give it up. As he explains to his young son, Joey (Cameron Bright), in this line of work the goal is not to be right but to dominate the conversation. If you put your opponent on the defensive, if you drown his claims with “facts” of your own, you will win the media battle. Adapting Christopher Buckley’s satirical 1994 novel, Jason Reitman (the son of the director and producer Ivan Reitman) maintains a juicily ambiguous tone. Nick sells an addictive pleasure with appeals to freedom of choice. He may have a point about personal responsibility (is there anyone left who doesn’t yet know of smoking’s dangers?), but he is also a master of such rhetorical shell games as the strategically selective lab report and the brazenly misleading syllogism. Nick is the intellectual equivalent of the golden-maned bruisers in professional wrestling—he’s magnetically villainous. In the person of Aaron Eckhart, he makes lying a lot sexier than telling the truth: Nick’s antagonist, the clear-thinking, anti-smoking Senator Ortolan Finistirre (William H. Macy), of Vermont, wears Birkenstocks and keeps novelty bottles of maple syrup in his office.

“Thank You for Smoking” is a nifty but slight movie. Some of the writing is obvious, and the dramatic structure is flimsy, if not downright arbitrary. But Eckhart, in a sure-handed performance, holds the picture together. Almost a decade ago, in Neil LaBute’s “In the Company of Men,” Eckhart was the unspeakable Chad, who played dirty tricks on a deaf woman as a way of gaining revenge on the female sex. Eckhart made Chad so consistently vile that I imagined he might be one of those rare honorable actors who, playing a creep, refuse to separate themselves from the character they’re exposing to our view. I wondered where Eckhart would go. Not all that far, it turned out. As the bearded and saintly biker absorbing Julia Roberts’s shock waves in “Erin Brockovich” (2000), he was unable to display any of his distinctive qualities of malevolent charm, and, in later LaBute projects, he didn’t come through as forcefully as he had in “Men.” But now he’s got a breakthrough role. Eckhart has a smile a yard wide, a square jaw, and a thatch of Redfordish blond hair, but he’s a bit cross-eyed, and when that grin spreads across his face you wonder if he’s happy or just gloating. Cinema desperately needs stars at the moment, and his off-kilter good looks and mildly unsavory persona fill the screen. Here and there in “Smoking,” as he was swinging his body around and tearing through Nick’s specious arguments, I thought of the hustling young Tony Curtis and also of Kirk Douglas, who played mesmerizing, hyped-up bastards in movies like “The Bad and the Beautiful.” Douglas was always clenched and humorless; Eckhart has his panache (and his cleft chin), but he also knows how to relax onscreen. If he gets the scripts he deserves, he could rival George Clooney for the smart-guy parts.

There is a trend in which industries try to get out ahead of their critics by presenting themselves as doing more for the public welfare than their critics are—as when liquor companies caution their patrons not to drink and drive. Reitman, picking up on the sallies in Buckley’s novel, takes that trend a step farther. Nick announces on television a fifty-million-dollar ad campaign to persuade kids not to smoke. This renunciation, of course, is the last thing the tobacco companies want from kids, but they must appear to want it. The movie suggests that Americans deserve to be spun by ploys like this; they’re too weak-minded, too distractible, not to be taken. The funniest bit of satire in the movie is the regular meetings, in a lugubrious K Street pub, of three friends who call themselves the MOD Squad. (The initials stand for “merchants of death.”) Besides Nick, there’s the beautiful wine-and-spirits spieler (Maria Bello) and the patriotic and gleefully murderous gun spokesman (David Koechner). The sin lobbyists are proud of their public misdeeds; they boast of their outrageous shucks while competing in lethality. Nick, with his twelve hundred deaths a day caused by cigarette smoking, wins hands down. Like all successful satirists, Reitman relishes and celebrates his bad guys. The tobacco kingpin who is Nick’s boss (Robert Duvall), moldering in Winston-Salem in baronial splendor, utters vicious remarks in the most courtly Southern tones. Slow-talking and immobile, Duvall still sends out sparks of energy. (He may be thinking, I get to play the Godfather at last.) Out in Hollywood, where Nick goes to seek a better image for smoking in movies, he meets a big-deal agent (Rob Lowe) and his sycophantic assistant (Adam Brody). Lowe and Brody, slender as reeds, are masters of a talent agency that, with its white-on-white décor and Zen trappings, looks suspiciously like C.A.A.; they offer the perfect Hollywood combination of reflexive pleasantness and insolent contempt. The scene is only a riff, but Reitman, someday, could do a dandy satire of his workplace.

At this point, one wants him to toughen up and hit harder. There are lovely touches in “Smoking,” like the opening-credits sequence, in which the names of the cast members are planted amid the crowns and crests of old cigarette packaging—a nostalgically ironic evocation of smoking’s glory years. But the plotting of “Smoking” feels formulaic. Nick sleeps with an opportunistic reporter from “the Washington Probe” (Katie Holmes), who spills his pillow talk into a front-page exposé, and his life goes into a tailspin. Eckhart is just as good at dissolute self-contempt as he is at studly confidence, but the movie takes a tiresome turn when Nick lugs his spookily articulate son around with him in an attempt to hold on to the kid’s affection. Nick doesn’t need redemption; we like him just fine as a louse.

FUGITIVE PIECES
Toronto author/poet Anne Michaels's acclaimed debut novel Fugitive Pieces will soon be made into a $10-million (U.S.) feature film starring two rising British actors, Rosamund Pike (who was Keira Knightley's older sister in Pride & Prejudice) and Stephen Dillane (who played Leonard Woolf to Nicole Kidman's Virginia in The Hours).

Production of the independent film is set to begin in a month, shooting first in Toronto and then moving to the sunny Greek Isles. Fellow Torontonians Jeremy Podeswa (who has written the screenplay and will direct) and Robert Lantos (whose Serendipity Point Films will produce) have teamed up to bring Michaels's first novel to the big screen, with a target date of spring, 2007.

Last week, Lantos explained that the project has been in the works for more than six years. Both he and Podeswa were hooked, he says, after reading Michaels's startlingly beautiful novel -- published in 1997 -- which tells the interlocking stories of two men from different generations whose lives have been transformed by war.

It has taken Podeswa (The Five Senses, Eclipse) the half-dozen years to fine-tune this script, which was a huge challenge, Lantos adds, because of Michaels's poetic prose. "It had to be just right to do the novel justice," explains Lantos, reached in Los Angeles, where he's frantically trying to cast the last two primary cast members before production gets under way April 24.

"Like me, Jeremy was deeply entranced with the book. He has spent all these years writing and rewriting, and rewriting some more. We both have wanted the screenplay to be impeccable. If we were going to make a film like this one, we want to make it really well," says Lantos, whose recent films include Sunshine, Being Julia and Where the Truth Lies.

"What makes this project so special? Well, for one thing, it's not that easy to make me cry. There are women who have been able to accomplish it on occasion," Lantos quips, "but rarely books and movies." Currently, he is also producing David Cronenberg's next film, Maps to the Stars, a black comic drama written by Bruce Wagner about Hollywood excess and intrigue.

Fugitive Pieces, published by Bloomsbury to critical acclaim, won Britain's Orange Prize, Ontario's Trillium Award and was shortlisted for Canada's Giller Prize. It tells the story of seven-year-old Jakob Beer (played, as an adult, by Dillane), whose parents are murdered by Nazi soldiers in Poland during the Second World War. His sister Bella is abducted. But Jakob is rescued by Greek geologist Athos Roussos (played by Rade Serbedzija), who takes him to his native island of Zakynthos.

Years later, the two move to Toronto after Athos accepts a university post. Jakob embarks on marriage, first to Pike's character, the animated, exhilarating Alex. He divorces and marries again, this time, later in life, to Michaela, who saves his soul. The second wife and another pivotal character, Ben (a young man fascinated with Jakob's life), have yet to be cast.

Dillane is an accomplished stage actor, who won Broadway's 2000 Tony Award as best actor in a play for a revival of Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing. He also appeared in The Spy Game (with Brad Pitt and Robert Redford), Welcome to Sarajevo and King Arthur.

"We had to find somebody exceptional," says Lantos. "This is the story of a man whose entire life is haunted by the events he witnessed as a child, and his guilt for having survived it when his parents and sister did not. It's the story of a man imprisoned by his internal memory, who then in middle age -- through the love of a woman -- is transformed. It has to be an exceptional actor to pull off a role that is so heavily internal. Jeremy and I think Stephen can more than conquer the challenge."

Recently, Pike starred opposite Johnny Depp in The Libertine. The British beauty, who graduated from Oxford, is currently in production on Fracture, opposite Anthony Hopkins and Canadian Ryan Gosling.

"Her role is a gorgeous woman in her 20s, who at this point in the 1960s, comes from a blue-blood background, but questions the values of the world around her. She associates with the café society. Most of her friends are Marxists. But she comes from the WASP establishment, and she takes on Jakob, this brilliant but deeply disturbed man, as her project."

When Lantos first decided to try to make the film, the rights were already optioned by someone else. "So I turned to the rights-owner and made a deal with them. Jeremy was already attached to the film," adds Lantos, who is collaborating with Podeswa for the first time. In addition to Fugitive Pieces, Podeswa has been busy directing episodes of hit TV programs such as Six Feet Under, Rome and Nip/Tuck.

"This story cuts through religious, ethnic and cultural divides," adds Lantos. "It's a story in which the most noble of human instincts overcomes the horrors around it."

MUSIC

Nelly Furtado [ft. Timbaland]: "Promiscuous Girl"
Big jungle drums and a Timbaland flute loop! Guess the smoothed-over sanguinity of Folklore is a distant memory. Where that record saw the married and newly-pregnant Nelly Furtado recruit Bela Fleck to guest banjo on a song about priorities, this single has her tapping Timbo's rawhide boom for a jam about casual sex. "Pay attention to me, I don't talk for my health," she sneers, as if to acknowledge her default language of corny metaphysical poetry has no place among the jilted and horny. Meanwhile, as Jan Hammer synths go off like flares, Timbaland quietly delivers one of the best vocal performances of his career. Nelly's 50/50 vocal foil, his wet, sorta-Cameo affect conveys the sleaze an at-heart good-girl like Furtado could never muster. And when he jibes, "I don't see no ring on your hand," its just another confirmation of that thing we already know: When it comes to pop music, unrest trumps mere contentedness every single time.