Thank you for smoking (2005)

Nick Naylor: Few people on this planet know what it is to be truly despised. Can you blame them? I earn a living fronting an organization that kills 1200 people a day. Twelve hundred people. We're talking two jumbo jet plane loads of men, women and children. I mean, there's Attila, Genghis... and me, Nick Naylor. The face of cigarettes, the Colonel Sanders of nicotine.

Nick Naylor is a man who loves his job and doesn’t care who knows it. Nick is the Tobacco lobby’s top spokesperson in Washington and even though he is completely aware of the harm he is doing, he is perfectly willing to carry on cheerfully in order to “pay the mortgage”.  

Nick desperately wants to build a relationship with his son, in spite of his ex-wife’s hostility to his job and it’s only when his son manages to use Nicks lobbying skill to convince his mother to allow him to go on a business trip with him that we see a softer side to the supposedly hard-hearted face of Big Tobacco.  As the film progresses, Nick is double-crossed by a journalist and invited to testify in front of the Senate before finally leaving tobacco and lobbying for less toxic clients.

What kind of person would consciously and voluntarily make themselves so hated by the general population at large? Another question would be why would the general population hate someone just because of their chosen career? We make assumptions about people because of their job which surely can’t stand up. What if Nick left tobacco and worked as a lobbyist for a charity? He would not have changed but our perception of him would have.    

All references come from IMDB:  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0427944/?ref_=nv_sr_1   

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