Smoke signals

On the set of ''Stripes," that oh-so-'80s classic comedy, the director's kid was running around soaking everything in -- the timing, the storytelling, and the themes, in which the bad guys were very bad, and the lovable and funny protagonists always got the girls.

The kid was there, one way or another, for ''Meatballs" too, and ''Ghostbusters," two more simple, taut comedies. The kid loved it, going so far as to ignore the advice of his famous father, Ivan Reitman, and go into the movie business anyway -- but on his own terms, taking his young generation's media-smart cynicism with him.

There's little surprise then that Jason Reitman's first full-length feature, ''Thank You for Smoking," is a dark comedy with satiric twists, a protagonist who is hard to like as he loyally defends Big Tobacco and passes on those questionable values to his son, and a movie about smoking in which not one coffin nail is seen aglow.

It's a story that ponders the issue of personal responsibility while stabbing political correctness in its bleeding heart, where the anti-smoking, Birkenstock-wearing Vermont senator played by William H. Macy comes off just as smarmy as Aaron Eckhart's Nick Naylor, the tobacco lobbyist who, despite surviving torture via nicotine patches, believes that corporate America needs its defenders, too. Reitman, 27, said that in testing the film, which opens Friday and is based on Christopher Buckley's novel, college audiences responded the best.

''I can tell that the kids there are kind of just as annoyed as I am with the culture of spin. They're not lying on television, but they're just not speaking frankly -- well, sometimes they're lying," said Reitman during a recent interview in Boston. ''It's just frustrating. You just want to say, 'Say what you're trying to say.' "

Reitman got his start directing short films and commercials, something he still loves to do because of the discipline and lightning-fast pace required. Even his short films have had corporate sponsors, whom Reitman has credited with allowing the creative process to flow without interference.

That, however, is where the similarity between Ivan's and Jason's work ends. The difference between their approaches stems from how the son and father were raised. Ivan Reitman's family survived the Holocaust, and he went on to make his name creating financially successful comedies; his son grew up in Beverly Hills, the progeny of a famous director. The son wants to stay in the business without giving in to the power of the studios.

The making of commercials, which Jason Reitman has been doing since he left Skidmore College at age 22, has helped him foster his own voice, allowing him to make a good living while remaining true to his vision of the films he wants to make. While waiting for the right feature to come along, Reitman said he turned down five years' worth of directing jobs that would have stifled that independence. Eventually, with the help of producer David O. Sacks, Reitman bought the rights to Buckley's novel away from Mel Gibson.

''Either way, I want to make more movies," he said. ''I just want to make small, smart, dangerous, subversive comedies and movies that are just cheap enough to stay true to themselves. You can't have a $50 million movie that makes fun of lung cancer. . . . I want to have a career that I can be proud of, and I'd much rather have that than a career that was abundantly financially successful."

The need to make those comedies came about for Reitman around age 14 when he had a pure cinematic experience by first watching Kevin Smith's ''Clerks," then Richard Linklater's ''Slacker," and later Wes Anderson's ''Bottle Rocket," three independent comedies that helped usher in the independent cinema renaissance.

''That changed my life," Reitman said. ''Up till then, I thought what a comedy was was the kind of films my dad made. But when I saw ''Clerks" it was like . . . it was like getting hit by a hammer.

''It was just so different," he added. ''Here's this completely independent, different movie by people in Jersey who I had never heard of. . . . My goals in life became really specific at that point. That's the kind of filmmaker I wanted to be, and it seemed like in doing that I could be a filmmaker on my own terms, and I'd have to deal a little less with all this daddy's boy [garbage]."

''Thank You for Smoking" entered the world with a bang, setting off a record-setting bidding war between Fox Searchlight and Paramount that resulted in Fox paying $6.5 million for the movie, the highest price associated with the 2005 Toronto Film Festival, where the bidding commenced.

The film made more news at the Sundance Film Festival when sex scenes between Katie Holmes and Eckhart were deleted from the reels, an error Reitman said was a simple glitch by a production assistant and not the result of any nefarious doings by the Church of Scientology or Holmes's fiance, Tom Cruise.

''Thank You for Smoking" is a tricky movie, and like all first features, it has some flaws, namely the lack of smoking in a movie about smoking. Reitman says it's purposeful; he didn't want to glorify smoking, which could overshadow the film's key theme about spin and truth. But it's an obvious mistake. When a doctor tells Naylor late in the film that he wouldn't have survived his nicotine patch attack if he hadn't been a smoker, the audience is forced to do a double-take as we've never once seen Naylor puffing away.

Dig deeper, however, and you'll find a movie that's trying to tackle some fundamental issues about scruples. It's not a movie that's pro-cigarette or anti-cigarette, but a film about choice and hypocrisy. Reitman cites Alexander Payne's biting ''Citizen Ruth" as an example he wanted to emulate.

Like many characters in Payne's movies such as ''Election," ''About Schmidt," and ''Sideways," Eckhart's Naylor is not likable. He's charming and smug, someone who successfully argues on national television that it's in the best interest of the tobacco industry to keep a young cancer patient alive so he can smoke more.

It's not about the addictive qualities of nicotine in tobacco, or what Naylor would refer to as the ''so-called" cancer. To Naylor, it's about personal responsibility and freedom of choice, so much so that when asked by a legislative committee if he would allow his own son to smoke, Naylor says that if his son wanted to, he'd buy him his first pack.

And somehow, though repulsive to most viewers, it works. Naylor comes away a hero, though one who makes us feel like taking a shower after watching the film.

But Naylor is not alone. There are few characters here that come away glowing, a situation that makes the film murky but interesting.

There's Holmes's Heather Holloway, who sleeps with Naylor then writes a scathing article for the Washington Probe without batting an objective eye (part of an overall abysmal performance). There's Rob Lowe's so-Los Angeles role as a Hollywood movie producer who is more than ready to help Naylor get more tobacco up on the big screen.

Even the one character you think is going to hold his moral ground, a dying Marlboro Man played by Sam Elliott, caves in.

So with nary a hero around, what we're left with in ''Thank You for Smoking" is a movie with few redeemable characters, a plotline that rambles, and a message that's hard to grasp. But to Reitman's credit, it is an original film.

Reitman said that by the time the movie's unconventional ending rolls around, Naylor does have scruples, believing as Reitman does that just as a murderer deserves a defense attorney, corporations need defenders as well.

''I think [Naylor] thinks of himself as a white knight coming to defend the defenseless," Reitman said. ''And he's great at it."