Two With William H. Macy

The masculine half of celebrity couple Filliam H. Muffman stars in two low-budget indies coming to DVD this Tuesday. Only one of them, the Stuart Gordon-David Mamet collaboration Edmond is worth your valuable time. The alternative, Thank You For Smoking, did in fact make me want to take up smoking...black tar heroin. Anything to escape the wrenching pain of this insipid attempt at "satire."

Edmond



Depressed businessman Edmond (Macy) leaves the office bound for home, but stops for a moment to visit a psychic. This is not normally the sort of thing Edmond would think to do, we gather, but he's feeling restless and out of sorts. The psychic does a tarot card reading, replete with ominous music and ambiguous symbology, and then tells Edmond:

"You are not where you belong."

Edmond seems to have already known that, yet the news leaves him deeply troubled. He goes home and breaks it off with his wife of seven years (Rebecca Pidgeon) , who seems more than a little taken aback by the news. He chats with a philosophical, charming racist (Joe Mantegna). Then he goes out looking to pay for sex.

David Mamet's screenplay adapts one of his earliest theatrical works for the screen and comes up with a lurid fantasy of a timid middle-class everyman's descent into madness. Think of it as a thinking man's Falling Down, with an existential crisis in place of that film's limp socio-economic critique.

Director and so-called "Master of Horror" Stuart Gordon trades in the schlocky gore theatrics of his most famous work (Re-Animator), save for one particularly brutal sequence, but nonetheless infuses this film with the best aspects of his previous films - gallows humor, lurid saturated color and actor Jeffrey Combs (who pops up in one scene as a clerk in a dirtbag motel.) Edmond is surprisingly cinematic for an adaptation from the stage, zipping around multiple locations and employing a large ensemble.

Many of these small, supporting turns go to celebrities, which can at times get distracting. George Wendt taking a few lines as a pawn shop owner of questionable morals works really well, as does Mena Suvari's very funny turn as a high-class prostitute with a quick temper. But I'm not as sure about Denise Richards, whose presence in the film serves no purpose other than getting her on to the DVD box.

Edmond encounters all these peculiar eccentrics on his late-night quest for female companionship but he can never seem to get the procedures down. He constantly argues over how much he will have to pay, offering a variety of opening prices and then growing frustrated with the ensuing negotiation. Other times, he rejects the very format of pornographic entertainment that he seeks, wondering aloud why strippers won't have sex with him or pimps need to charge for their services. In one scene, he has a temper tantrum when he realizes that a peep show dancer (Bai Ling) will remain behind a glass partition.

He grows increasingly alienated and paranoid by his failure to find a willing woman. He pawns his wedding ring and buys an old knife, and the film transitions from a drama about the emptiness that hides behind the mundane activity of daily life into a psychological horror film. As in some of his later works, when the pressures of modern life and work push rational men over the edge and into insanity, Mamet sketches Edmond as a person who has always had rage and resentment bubbling under a facade of calm, but who managed to somehow keep these emotions in check for years.

Unfortunately, when he tries to free himself from the rut that his life has become, when he opens himself up to new experiences, all of these suppressed urges are suddenly released into his ill-prepared mind. He can't grow as a person without regressing.

The bittersweet and unexpected conclusion also says a lot about fate. Just as the psychic predicted, Edmond was not where he really belonged, and maybe all of the terrible things that happened to him were neccessary for him to find some sense of security and well-being. I'm not sure David Mamet nor I actually believe in the implications of that interpretation of the film - that everything happens so that people can wind up in the place where they belong - but it's certainly a nice thought.

Thank You For Smoking

I'd call the pseudo-satirical Thank You For Smoking "toothless," but that would be an insult to professional hockey players and Mountain Dew fans everywhere. A woeful combination of flimsy libertarian blather and cynicism, Smoking clearly yearns for the incisive bite of Alexander Payne's Citizen Ruth or Election, but also tries to work in a lazy Jerry Maguire story about a slick suit who discovers a void in his personal life. These two types of filmmaking don't go together. At all. But writer/director Jason Reitman's script also lacks the wit or the perspective on Big Tobacco to make any of his lame critiques actually count for anything. His films gives up on even taking a position on the Tobacco Industry, cigarette warning labels or any of the other issues raised, opting to make the story about one boring ficitonal character's journey from self-satisfied loudmouth asshole into even more self-satisfied loudmouth asshole.



It's not like there isn't ample material available for a satire on cigarettes in America. In one corner, you have massive, greedy corporations who not only produce a product that they know kills millions around the world but who purposefully make it more dangerous and addictive to increase their profits. In another, you've got weepy martyrs who secretly desire a Nanny State to tell them exactly who to live their lives, insisting that the private vices of others are somehow their own personal business. Finally, you have opportunistic politicians who pretend to care about public health issues but really just want to get on television as much as possible. All of these real circumstances could be exploited in a sharp, funny comedy.

That's just not this comedy. Instead, Reitman (working from a book by Christopher Buckley) bases his film around the rather odd conceit that tobacco lobbyists are ingenious dynamos who manipulate everyone around them for the benefit of greedy tobacco executives. The entire Tobacco Industry is really an extension of lobbyist Nick Naylor's (Aaron Eckhart) ego, and the movie treats it as such.

Thus, no aspect of the cigarette business and the way it is conducted gets anything but a cursory, superficial examination. We meet the head of the Tobacco lobbying association (J.K. Simmons) and his boss (Robert Duvall), who goes back to the old days when Big Tobacco first became Big, but combined they get maybe 10 minutes of screen time. Likewise, a Democratic Vermont Senator (Macy), the only politician featured in the film, is a mean-spirited doofus who doesn't know what he's talking about. Surprise, surprise. This is about as deep as the movie digs for laughs. A self-serving Senator who pretends to care about people but is actually really mean. Wow, what insight into the way business is conducted in our government!

Even more fatal than its willingness to trade in trite cliche, though, is that none of these characters are funny and yet the movie clearly thinks they are all incredibly funny. It's that combination of smarmy self-satisfaction and mock-bravery with an utter lack of actual humor that's the toxic cocktail bringing down Thank You For Smoking.

At the center of the Suck is the Nick Naylor character himself, despite the talented Eckhart's best efforts. In the odious and unneccessary voice-over, Naylor constantly brags about his abilities as a professional liar. He's the best in the business, the ultimate talker. What Charles Manson is to killing, Nick is to bullshit. He says, "You know that guy who always gets all the chicks? I'm that guy...on crack."

So we naturally expect him to be really clever, to constantly outwit his opponents with flashy rhetorical tricks and logic traps. Instead, over and over, he makes lame arguments of the kind you'd expect from an amateur high school team debater. It's actually kind of embarrassing that the movie finds Naylor clever and sly, when nothing he says even makes sense.

In one scene at a theme park or something, Naylor explains to his son (Cameron Bright, who by my estimation played every male child in every film released this year) why it's more important to win an argument than to be right. He proceeds to give him a lesson in that patented talking-head tactic, the Strawman Argument. We get a long painful scene where Naylor and his argue chocolate vs. vanilla, before Naylor shifts the conversation to whether or not his son would want chocolate every day for the rest of his life with no further variety.

"But I'm not convinced," his son reasonably replies. "I'm not trying to convince you," Naylor smirks. "I'm trying to convince them." He then points out to all the people milling around the park who aren't listening to him. This scene makes no sense. The point originally was that Naylor is going to teach his son how to win an argument, but in the end, all he's doing is explaining a useful device for going on Bill "Gentle Warrior" O'Reilly's show. The real point is, in terms of argumentation, he didn't convince his son that vanilla was better than chocolate, and thus doesn't "win" or prove anything.

Even more ludicrous examples of Naylor's "talent" abound. At one point, he has a moment fo sheer inspiration, devising the argument that is going to save his life and career. So he goes in front of a Senate sub-committee and argues that cigarettes shouldn't have warning labels because we don't put warning labels on artrery-clogging cheese.

I mean, are you fucking kidding me? That's a Homer Simpson argument. "I saved your life, Lenny! That egg would have killed you by cholesterol!" This guy's supposed to be the greatest tobacco lobbyist of all time?

So, okay, the movie has no insight into its choice of topic and its not funny. Normally, that would be cause for a bad review but not a total smackdown. What made me really hate the film was its cocky, smarmy attitude, the fact that the movie seems to delight in ridicule, human misery and death, and how frequently Reitman gloats about how no one or nothing can ever make a dent in corporate corruption and greed. Coming from the rich white son of a famous director (Ivan Reitman), based on a book by the rich white son of a famous writer (William Buckley), both of whom got to make the film because of family connections and inherited wealth and status, this kind of apathetic, snide approach, which essentially argues for an easy but corrupt status quo for lack of any "better" options, is just plain unappealing.

Nick meets up every week with his friends from the alcohol and gun lobby. Together, they call themselves the Merchants of Death, or the MOD Squad. Maria Bello and David Koechner, as the respective alcohol and gun proponents, give the film's only two likable performances, because they are honest and self-effacing. Bello can play this kind of laid back, one of the guy's career gal in her sleep, and Koechner's made an entire career now out of playing awkwardly macho wannabe alpha males, but these scenes with the lobbyists are really the only times when the movie slows down, stops trying to prove how smart and insightful it is and focuses on a few semi-realistic human beings in a funny, real-world situation.

Katie Holmes has the complete opposite assignment, a shrill and highly unpleasant role as an ambitious young journalist. This entire subplot, in which Nick becomes romantically involved with a reporter and discloses some of his personal feelings on his job, is both offensive unrealistic to the point of farce. We're supposed to believe a successful female reporter gets her subjects to talk to her by fucking them. We're supposed to believe the most powerful tobacco lobbyist in Washington would tell a reporter his secrets in bed. We're supposed to believe said lobbyist would then have a chance of keeping his job. It's utter, utter nonsense.

(Not to mention the conclusion of this plotline. How come the "happy ending" means that Nick gets to keep his job and status after it's disclosed that he slept with a reporter while Holmes' Heather has her career ruined? Weren't they equally culpable in any irresponsible behavior?)

It all really comes back to this lazy, bullshit laissez-faire attitude. Everything's fucked up permanantly, and there's nothing you can do about it, so just shut up and let rich people continue making their money. The Holmes storyline is a perfect illustration - this uppity bitch reporter shouldn't be making problems for Nick by using her slutty feminine wiles, cause he'll just turn it around on her and destroy her in the process. So she should just shut up and take it like everyone else. Likewise Macy's Senator. Yes, Big Tobacco is knowingly killing people, but so what? That's how they make money and that's how the world works! Get out of their face! Ugly, nihilistic stuff...

I'm not even in favor of increased warnings on cigarettes or smoking bans or anything like that. I say, if it's legal then it's legal and people should be able to smoke freely in public. (I'd make exceptions for enclosed spaces like airplanes and movie theaters, but I think restaurants and bars should be able to choose if they want to allow indoor smoking.) So I'm open to a harsh critique of the anti-smoking lobby. Likewise, I'm anti-corporate enough to enjoy any satire of greedy executives. Thank You For Smoking needed to choose a side. Just hanging out with the cold, calculating and essentially unconcerned lobbyists and goofing (badly) on everyone doesn't make you seem cool. It makes you seem terrified to make a statement.

This is easily one of the least enjoyable and obnoxious films I've seen all year. (I'm not so sure about worst, though. That's already kind of a tight competition.)