A certain moral flexibility...

"Dad, can anyone be a lobbyist?"

"No, my job requires a certain moral flexibility that goes beyond most people."

Ah, back down to cheap Tuesdays at the Esquire ($5.50 all seats, all shows) for a showing of Thank You for Smoking.

I had heard that the film was a good one, but I certainly didn't expect the excellently funny film that we ended up with. Aaron Eckhart is a charismatic lead who describes himself by asking "You know the guy who can pick up any girl? I'm that guy...on crack." (I'm paraphrasing - it's not like I was writing quotes while watching the movie.) His character - Nick Naylor - is a fast talking, quick thinking, brilliantly prepared lobbyist for the tobacco industry's Academy for Tobacco Studies.

The entire film centers around Naylor as he meets with the last great tobacco baron, heads to Hollywood to get cigarettes into the hands of the sexiest stars in their sexiest movie scenes, brilliantly buys off the original Marlboro Man, spends lunch with his fellow Merchants of Death (the MOD squad), gets kidnapped and told that cigarettes saved his life, drops the ball while sleeping with a gorgeous Washington Probe reporter who doesn't quite specify when things are off the record, and finally redeems himself in front of a senate subcommittee hearing.

The heart of the story, however, lies in the relationship between Naylor and his son - played brilliantly by Cameron Bright (also seen this summer in X-Men: the Last Stand as Leech). Naylor takes his son with him to Hollywood to meet agents and muses on why he does his job while looking at his son asleep against the passenger seat window.

In the end, the film is a well-written examination of one man who is trying to do his best at his job and on the home front in teaching his son what it's like to be a man with responsibilities and am impressive array of people skills. He's certainly far from perfect - and the worst part of the film we saw was the low quality of the print, perhaps the fault of the filmmakers, perhaps the fault of the Esquire - but he's doing the best he can to casually navigate through an emotional minefield.