A satire with fire

It's been a while since a good satire appeared on our screens but Jason Reitman's Thank You For Smoking takes the delicious target of spin and hurls brickbat after brickbat.

An adaptation of Christopher Buckley's book, it follows Nick (Aaron Eckhart), a PR man with muzak where his conscience ought to be. Nick is a spokesman for Big Tobacco and he's very, very good - which infuriates anti-smoking senator Finistirre (William H Macy) as much as it causes hot, young reporter Heather Holloway (Katie Holmes) to salivate.

The spin provides the humour - Nick's best friends are PRs for alcohol and guns and the trio get competitive over whose product causes more deaths - but the film centres on the relationship between Nick and his son.

'The hole in the libertarian argument is children,' explains Reitman. 'Personal responsibility is all well and good but it doesn't address how children are supposed to make decisions for themselves. So the person pushing this idea needed to be a parent himself.'

And there's the rub. Nick is clever and amoral enough to explain to a little girl that if her mother isn't a doctor or a scientist, she's hardly a credible expert on whether smoking is bad for you.

But he also loves his son - and the film deftly maintains the tension between good parenting and good spinning.

Reitman has obviously inherited the comic gifts of his father, Ghostbusters director Ivan, although he maintains he wants to make different kinds of comedies: films that are 'smaller, more satirical'. Thank You For Smoking is satire with no sap - and no smoking either.

'You see cigarettes but you never see them smoked,' says Reitman. 'That would have distracted from the talk and the film is about talking. And I didn't want people to think the movie was pro or anti-smoking: it's neither.'

It's pretty incendiary, though. At one point, Nick tries to bribe the gravely ill Marlboro Man, which is close enough to real events (not the bribery, but the real Man died of lung cancer) to make it surprising Marlboro allowed the use of their brand. Except they didn't.

'I haven't talked to Marlboro,' Reitman admits. 'No one has. We figured we wouldn't hear from them and we haven't. Big Tobacco would prefer that the party line be libertarian - basically the ideology of this film.