All the characters in Christopher Buckley's wry novel on lobbyists in Washington, D.C., Thank You for Smoking, possess what protagonist Nick Naylor refers to as "moral flexibility." It is a quality that both politicians and the corporate shills who line official pockets rely on to assuage whatever guilt they may experience for their actions. In short, it is a morally neutral universe; "good" and "evil" are merely designations denoting a particular group's pull.

With his matinee-idol looks and gift for rhetoric, Naylor (Aaron Eckhart) is the golden boy of the merchants of death. In fact, he belongs to a small Merchant of Death club (the MOD Squad) consisting of his friends Polly Baily (Maria Bello), who represents alcohol and brewery concerns, and Bobby Jay Bliss (David Koechner), who is the smiling face of firearms. When not pushing their employers' agendas on the Hill, the three wash up at a local tavern to argue over whose product kills the most people.

Turning the tables against a liberal anti-smoking campaigner on a national talk show (with the presence onstage of a teenaged "Cancer Boy" as emotional ammunition), Naylor is awarded the chance of convincing Hollywood to start pushing cigarettes in its films again, as it did in the '30s and '40s, the Golden Age of coffin nails.

In the Zen-like calm of the office of film mogul Jeff Megall (Rob Lowe), Naylor seems to hit pay dirt. Megall is working on a sci-fi project, Message from Sector Six, with Brad Pitt and thinks it could make a great product tie-in. "Cigarettes in space?" Nick asks. "But wouldn't they blow up in an all-oxygen environment?"

"Probably," Megall responds, "But it's an easy fix. One line of dialogue: 'Thank God we invented the'... you know, whatever device."

Thank You for Smoking's Washington is, ironically, a brutal pit of social Darwinism in a country that still clings to divine creation fantasies. Naylor's motto — "Michael Jordan plays basketball. Charles Manson kills people. I talk." — seems to serve as the universal job description. But Naylor has enemies, and two will try to stub him out (one with an assassination attempt using Nicoderm patches).

Naylor's primary opponent is the liberal senator from Vermont, Ortolan K. Finistirre (the marvelous William H. Macy), a Birkenstocks-shod bleeding heart who wants to place a skull and crossbones on every pack of cigarettes. Finistirre also has his own Hollywood plans for digitally removing the cigarettes inevitably hanging from Bette Davis or Humphrey Bogart's lips. "We're not rewriting history, but improving it," he gushes to a talking head. But the good senator is, perhaps, the worst manipulator of anyone, going so far as to dress down his principal aide, who dug up the Cancer Boy for the talk show, for finding a kid insufficiently cancer-ridden.

Reitman's cast knows how to underplay its lines so that the humor continually surprises you. It's an excellent group of performers, including Robert Duvall as the Big Daddy of Big Tobacco, Sam Elliott as a cancer-stricken Marlboro Man ("I smoked Kools!"), young Cameron Bright as Naylor's dutifully impressionable son and Katie Holmes, as a devious newspaper journalist.