How Choke Chokes

Screening Liberally Big Picture
by Josh Bolotsky

If you went to a public high school, then you've met this kid before. It's that simple.

You know the one - trying so hard to sell himself as the pervy class clown with a secret heart of gold. The routine is simple enough: he makes a few unsavory wisecracks cracks about gonorrhea during health class, but, when lunchtime rolls around, he can be found sitting alone at the table towards the back of the cafeteria, writing feverishly in a mead composition journal, trying so hard to look pained and, well, sensitive, earnest, quietly perceptive and bittersweetly melancholic without seeming too lugubrious.

In other words, hoping against hope that someone will ask him what, exactly, he's writing, so he can half-smile, blush as he looks at the floor and stage-mutters, "just some poem, it's not, I mean, it's nothing special." Hoping against hope that the inquisitor will let out a wide-eyed and wide-grinned non-ironic "Really...?" and beg to read it. And when, after much further faux-protestation, he gives in and does read a verse, the whole school, nay, the whole town will see what a vibrant, insightful heart he really has, will see that he's not just this joker in an 80s metal t-shirt - it just takes one poem read out loud in a cafeteria and they'll all overlook his awful remarks about his female classmates' bodies, all the gym class "joking" that really constituted a minor reign of terror, and just, somehow, write all of it off as a self-defense mechanism, will just know that he means well and is so inconceivably lonely.

At least, that's how the fantasy goes - which is all that it will ever be. Because he'd never dream of outright revealing something new about himself, unprovoked by queries in the lunchroom - no, someone has to do so on his behalf. Otherwise, were he to outright declare his own fear and sadness - well, he'd have to display some kind of courage, suffer the possibility it'll just be another entry on the laundry list of why he feels socially unacceptable, that his self-published zine will become one of the reasons cited when someone threatens a beatdown or turns down the one prom invitation he could handle. So he sits, stewing in his own lack of initiative, only venturing the occasional cry for recognition disguised as self-deprecation ("Because I have so many friends, and am soooooo busy Friday night!"), never quite being who he is, hoping for some kind of epiphany after graduation.

Again, if you went to public high school, you knew this person. You might have had classes with him, or gone on a too-awkward-to-relay-properly date after receiving an impossible intricate mixtape given by shaking hands. Or you might even be him, or were him once.

Watching the new comedy Choke, based on the novel of the same name by Chuck Palahniuk, is much like being forced into a room with one of the nicer, more tolerable versions of this guy for 90 minutes. By no means it is all bad: there are moments where you laugh, sometimes in spite of yourself, at the sheer outrageousness of the attack on common decency contained within his last comment, at the last easy joke made at the expense of the senile or the compulsive. There even are a few moments where you legitimately feel a stirring of sympathy at the latest reference to a battered childhood or a genuinely tragic series of events. But mostly, you just cringe.

And there's a lot to cringe at - while I can't say that I've read the original novel, the sheer list of awfulnesses attached to the life of our protagonistic, Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell), reads like a parody of Palahniuk's typical quasi-nihilistic stomping grounds. He is:

- a sex addict who cruises Sex Addict Support Groups for the sole purpose of having a steady stream of quick, unmessy partners, typically in the restroom between sessions, entirely unconcerned that he is knocking people off a path to recovery and presumably ruining already-much-disrupted lives in the process.
- a scam artist who deliberately chokes on food in high-end establishments, so he can guilt-trip whoever saves his life with false sob stories in the mail for years to come, thereby manipulating them into sending money.
- also willing to accept money to enact the simulated rape fantasies of wealthy, single women.
- a "historical interpreter" at a colonial-era theme park who takes great pleasure of breaking the 4th wall in front of visitors in the nastiest, most vulgar ways possible.

There is, to say the least, a lot going on here, and while the more cynical might say that this seems less like an authentic collection of personal characteristics and more like an overgrown collection of aim-to-shock tidbits that were accidentally all used in the same manuscript, one could easily make a very interesting film out of a study of this character alone, without much need for a propulsive narrative. But Choke aims both for some semblance of a plot, and to make its protagonist sympathetic - and this is where it all falls apart, on both counts.

Choke is so busy at its first task, its hands so filled with viscerally detailing Victor's character flaws with the glee of a camp counselor telling an especially gory urban legend for the 25th time, that it barely has room to jam in the storyline - so it only kinda does. Y'see, Victor kinda has a legally committed, mentally ill mother Ida (Angelica Huston), who is kinda falling apart due to some Alzheimers-linked dementia, and, well, Victor kinda sees this as his only opportunity to finally learn the true identity of his long-gone father. And his confidante on the hospital staff, Dr. Paige Marshall, (Kelly Macdonald), kinda works with him to unlock this mystery as the mother gradually becomes less and less lucid. Oh, and they kinda fall in love too.

Why only kinda? Because Choke either doesn't care about its story as anything other than filler, or it does a masterful job of acting like it doesn't. (Is it fair to say that no work of art aims for an indifferent response?) The pacing is so consistently off here, so by turns manic and glacial, so off-kilter in the way it randomly alternates between the "look at me!" of a sad teenager acting naughty in class (or group therapy sessions) to get attention, and the "look at me!" of the same sad teenager casually recounting some act of motherly negligence so as to justify his actions, that it becomes nearly impossible to become emotionally invested in Victor in any serious way.

It doesn't surprise when 30 minutes in when, apropos of nothing, we cut from yet another oh-so-self-consciously-shocking sex scene to shots of Victor running through the hospital, looking for his mother, only to find that she's been moved to a far more serious ward. And then we lose that thread, and we jump to the fact that Victor's best friend, the compulsive masturbator and fellow support-group predator Denny (Brian William Henke), has somehow inherited a vacant lot (whose? how? unclear) and is filling it with the stones he used to hold as a reminder not to masturbate. And we follow that for another five minutes. And then it just, um, ends. Did I mention that Paige thinks that Victor's parentage is divine, that Ida was a guinea pig in a secret maternity experiment involving the "sacred foreskin" of Jesus? That happens too. But only for about 10 minutes.

And throughout all of this, we play witness to the film's half-hearted claims that Victor isn't that bad of a guy after all - and, as reprehensible as much of Victor's behavior may be, this case could, of course, be made, even if it's simply to warn against dehumanizing Victor rather than realizing just how complicated a psychological profile would have to be. How complicated? Endless flashbacks to Ida's criminally abusive parenting are utilized; his sex addiction is portrayed as a truly crippling disease at times; and the parasitic practice of milking for money those who save his life is rationalized as necessary to pay his mother's medical bills. Yes, the case could be made.

But Choke doesn't seem to be interested in making it - in the scenes where Victor inspires terror in the hearts of meek standersby, be it by hitting on them in wildly inappropriate ways that most would consider sexual harassment, or engaging in acts that might best be described as emotional terrorism, the film hits all of the beats of an anything-goes buddy comedy in its tacit admiration for the balls of its rebel protagonist. Well, okay. But then, like the kid dragged to the principal's office and forced to make a half-hearted apology, Choke seems to realize at times that it needs to make sure we have at least some sympathy for Victor, lest we totally shut off from his character, see him somewhat satisfied at the end of his Excellent Adventure and not call it a happy ending. Put another way, that we might notice that it might be a happy ending for Victor, but not so much for the woman whose mental illness he seems to be taking for an advantage.

It's hard to finish watching this film and not conclude that the filmmakers must be patting themselves on the back for their courage in making such a supposedly edgy film, one that seems to revel in its willingness to make skirt the constraints of the R rating - and their act of will in releasing a major studio film that contains as much supposed box office poison as this one does is commendable. However, it'd have taken real courage to defend, truly defend, behavior it spends an entire film detailing, behavior many would consider indefensible, to make all the most perfunctory efforts to rehabilitate Victor. But when the time comes, Choke just chokes.

But would you like to read its poems sometime?