Grade: B-
For a film about sex, "Choke" is surprisingly unsexy. It is, however, incredibly trite. It's the classic tale of a man's self-discovery.
Victor (Sam Rockwell) is a real freak. He's addicted to sex and unable to love. The film follows Victor as he tries to conquer his demons and reconcile his relationship with his demented, dying mother, played by Anjelica Houston.
Victor soon discovers that his father is not, as his mother always claimed, a traveling Swedish salesman, but something more mysterious. Part of his journey then becomes the unraveling of this mystery. For this task he enlists the help of his similarly freaky best friend, Denny (Brad William Henke), and his mother's new doctor, Paige (Kelly MacDonald.)
Directed and adapted by Clark Gregg from the Chuck Palahniuk novel, "Choke" is nothing like Palahniuk's most famous work, 1999's "Fight Club." Fans of the latter may be surprised by how different the two movies are. "Choke" replaces "Fight Club's" action and brutishness with a slower, more refined story, while still retaining Palahniuk's trademark wit and unorthodox sense of humor.
The title of the film comes from the main character's secondary "occupation." Victor is in the habit of going to restaurants, purposely choking on his food and then keeping in touch with the people who rescue him. He makes up fake traumas to report to these pen-pals, who are then prompted to send him money, which Victor uses to keep his mother in a private hospital. He writes off the unscrupulous nature of this dubious scheme by claiming that it provides a valuable service to the people who rescue him. He allows them to feel like heroes, a feeling which is renewed each time they send a little cash to help out with his "gingivitis," or whatever this month's malady happens to be.
Whether or not Victor actually believes or cares about the coincidental benefit of his scam is unclear.
Victor's troubled relationship with his mom is revealed in a series of flashbacks, annoyingly signaled by a cliché fade to white. The flashbacks help to illuminate Victor's character. At one point, his love interest accuses him of lying after he puts forth a rather outrageous excuse for the missing chunk of his ear. She's not buying it, and Victor sheepishly agrees with her that he kind of lies a lot.
The viewer thinks little of it, beyond recognizing that at least he's honest about his habitual dishonesty, until a flashback reveals that he was actually telling the truth about his ear. He lied about lying because he's so desperate to feel understood, which of course is even more pathetic than the compulsive lying would have been.
Another flashback reveals the origins of the choking scheme. Except for the flashback showing Victor's first encounter with anonymous sex, each of the sequences show the young Victor with his mother, a radical who was in the habit of stealing him away from his foster parents. Her motives are never revealed, nor do we find out why Victor was placed into foster care in the first place.
The relationship between the boy and his loony mother is grossly underdeveloped, considering that it's the one which set him on his peculiar path in life, and he spends the whole film trying to get straightened out again.
It seems the theme of "Choke" is underdevelopment. The movie, running a meager 90 minutes, could have stood to be a solid two hours if only Gregg had gone deeper into the issues raised therein. In addition to neglecting Victor's relationship with his mother, the film skirts around the compulsive choking, which it could have explored to greater effect. Instead, it focuses on Victor's official job as a "historical interpreter" at a Plymouth Plantation-style village, where Victor plays "the backbone of colonial America" - an Irish indentured servant.
The movie delves fairly deep into Victor's addiction with numerous sex scenes, each more cringe-inducing than the last. The sex is realistic in its awkwardness, as there are no attractive people in the film - at least, no one who is attractive by movie standards. Anjelica Houston is the most beautiful actress in the film, but she's too old and too goofy to be sexy in it.
"Choke" creeps into the awkwardness of people's sexual foibles, including one hysterical scene with a neurotic rape-fantasist whom Victor meets online.
The film is anything but subtle. It hammers the viewer over the head with messages about personal discovery. A few scenes are nothing more than one character explaining to another just what his issues are, as if character and audience alike didn't already know. Thus, some of the scenes are dull and tedious. The ones that aren't, however, are frequently funny. In particular, the scenes at Victor and Denny's job where everyone is required to speak in Colonial-style English - a rule enforced by their uptight, ridiculous boss - is consistently hilarious. The patients at the hospital, who each are convinced that Victor is someone who wronged them early in life, is very amusing to watch.
All the joy of "Choke" comes not from the basic story, but from what's done with it. The dialog and the acting help buoy the movie, as does the somewhat sick twist about Victor's parentage. The film is quite quirky, and for all its faults, it succeeds at being funny, and twisted.
Morgan Meagher can be reached at mmeagher@student.umass.edu.
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