Thank you for smoking United 93 (2006)

"Thank You for Smoking" is a godsend for audiences who love movies packed with their favorite character actors being corrupt, stupid, slimy, downright evil, and always unrepentant. It’s sometimes a smug and shallow satire, but, then again, so is its protagonist. Professional jackass Aaron Eckhart (“In the Company of Men”) was born to play the smarmy, open-faced, shit-eating tobacco representative; it’s the kind of performance that’s so effortless, so natural, that it will certainly be overlooked come awards’ time. The movie is mostly about that delicious balance between laws that protect us and the freedom to abuse ourselves out of existence.


Eckhart’s nemesis is the senator (god-who-walks-as-man William H. Macy) who is, in his way, virtually as despicable as Eckhart is. Macy’s senator ends the movie by trying to edit cigarettes out of old movies and replace them with things like candy canes. The movie’s best episode involves Eckhart meeting with a powerful and possibly insane Hollywood powerbroker (Rob Lowe) to try to get more cigarettes into the movie. “Do you know what time it is Tokyo?” Lowe asks. “4:00 tomorrow. It’s the future.” "Thank You" is great fun as a comedy and not as successful at being a satire; it’s the kind of mass-market movie that tricks critics into thinking it’s much more “edgy” than it really is. You’ll have a good time but probably won’t learn anything new. And, yes, Jason Reitman is the son of “Ghostbusters” director Ivan Reitman.

As for "United 93," oh, part of my wants-wants-wants to go along with the flow and call this movie a masterpiece. And yet, and yet, and yet there are two things that jump out at me. First are the title cards right after the movie has finished and the credits are about to begin. It doesn’t matter what they say; having any little “message” here to tie things together in a needlessly comforting little bow so that we can go home with some kind of sentimental chaser to cut the grimness is a letdown (albeit a small one), especially after the movie so wisely refuses commentary for most of its runtime.

As for what those cards do say—the movie’s “lesson,” I guess—it’s an underwhelming complaint about governmental organization, as if all America needed to avert 9/11 was a cosmic FLYLady. This is accurate to an extent, I suppose, but hardly matching the dramatic impact of what goes before it. My second issue: I understand that there was a European on United 93, and I accept that there was probably someone onboard who wanted to appease the terrorists, but why did he have to be the same person in this film? Even audience members who equate “Frenchman” with “America-hating sissy” and smacked their lips at his treachery have to admit that this is jarring. This is a bit of commentary from the filmmakers in a film that otherwise has none (like a piece of “Last Temptation of Christ” snuck into “Passion of the Christ”).

And that’s what “United 93” does so well: it watches. Director Paul Greengrass tells his story in short, handheld shots, observing without judging, without using any big-name actors (although I did recognize Christian Clemenson from “The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.”). Dialogue overlaps, real-life people play themselves, and characters are not given melodramatic backgrounds. Greengrass knows how crowds move and what a riot looks like; it will be interesting to compare this to “World Trade Center” later this year from Oliver Stone, who, while certainly frenetic, is also a bit more of a painterly director. “United 93” deserves mention in the same sentence as “The Exorcist,” not for subject matter, but because both films cause the same nervous-lump-in-the-stomach feeling as we wait for awful things to happen, as harried men with their sleeves rolled up and their neckties loosened notice something out-of-place on their radar screens.

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