Thank You For Smoking: book and movie
I recently watched Thank You For Smoking. To my surprise, it was an excellent movie. It was a well-acted, witty satire of American politics, with none of the boring proselitizing that one might have expected from the title. Then someone mentioned that Christopher Buckley’s book of the same title was better. Having now read the book, I must conclude that this person was deeply mistaken.
So what’s wrong with the book? First, it’s simply less believable. Bits like the plot to frame the main character of his own kidnapping; the involvement of Margaret Thatcher (or rather, to avoid libel suits in British courts, a lady who is precisely identical to Margaret Thatcher apart from her name); Jeanette the wily sexy backstabbing BDSM bombshell; and worst of all, an utterly ludicrous Tom Clancy-like operation at the very end. Second, the movie makes some of the characters much more interesting. In the book, Heather Holloway is pretty much a sexy non-entity. In the movie — well, I don’t want to spoil it; but her role perfectly fits in with the main theme. In the book, Naylor, the main character, comes off as a fairly uninteresting person carrying on mainly through blind luck; other characters, and he himself, describe him as diabolical — but his thoughts and actions do not support that conclusion. By contrast, the movie’s Nick Naylor is a clever sophist, a brilliant spin doctor, a master of his own destiny, and somehow much more likeable. The book barely mentions Naylor’s kid; in the movie, he is a central, and interesting, character. The book presents BR, Naylor’s boss, as a typical, boring villain; in the movie, he is much more nuanced.
But the biggest problem with the book, in my opinion, is that it is black-and-white. Tobacco is bad and evil. Naylor is bad and evil. Polly the liquor lobbyist is bad and evil. Anti-tobacco campaigners are pure and good. And at the end, the evil people see the light, get a just punishment, and convert to the side of the anglels. It is an intensely boring scenario.
The movie is much more subtle. Every single character is some shade of gray; everyone is a bit of the bastard; nobody, on either side of the fight, is really good or evil. The evil — if it exists — is in the system that they have to operate in. And that, to me, seems like a much more mature way of looking at the world of American lobbyists.