When you’re talking to them, they seem like perfectly nice boys. To be frank, I’m much more concerned for my safety around Normal Mailer.

Back in the 1990s, there was a unfortunate epidemic of duplicate projects in Hollywood, plaguing us all with competing films about volcanoes, earth-killing asteroids and Wyatt Earp. If back then you would have informed me that the next time this phenomenon surfaced, the subject would be author Truman Capote, I would have driven you to the Betty Ford clinic myself.

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Ever since I was a child, folks have thought they had me pegged, because of the way I am, the way I talk. And they’re always wrong.

Capote is a film that literally hangs on the performance of its star, so it’s a good thing that Philip Seymour Hoffman completely vanishes into the role of author Truman Capote. Without Hoffman’s presence, I’m afraid that this film wouldn’t hold together. It certainly wouldn’t have held my attention.

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We don’t sell Tic Tacs, we sell cigarettes. And they’re cool, available, and addictive. The job is almost done for us.

This movie wants to be the Dr. Strangelove of the tobacco wars and I’ll be darned if doesn’t almost do it. Some might say that cigarettes are an even more audacious subject for a comedy than nuclear war, since tobacco takes out more people in a given year then the A-bomb has in the history of the human race. Thank You For Smoking certainly aims for big targets, but they are also easy targets. The film’s position, namely that tobacco companies have behaved with the all the moral fiber of Jeffrey Dahmer’s ne’er-do-well brother, is hardly original nor particularly newsworthy. This acid-etched satire, directed by Ivan Reitman’s son, Jason, scores its points with sharply drawn characters.

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