Movies: Choke

Go see this movie right now.

Please?

Come on, live a little...

Choke is another film based on the work of cult author Chuck Palahniuk. He's the guy responsible for the deliciously dark Fight Club which was adapted into an equally cultish film in 1999 starring Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. If you've seen the film or read the book, then you should have a pretty good idea of what to expect from Choke: a bizarre blend of shocking degeneracy, subversive social commentary and black, black humor. If you know me you know I like my comedy as black as can be.

This time around we're getting the story of Victor Mancini who, like the unnamed narrator of Fight Club, also attends weekly group sessions. While Fight Club's narrator fakes illnesses to achieve a cathartic release, Mancini has a very genuine sex addiction. The twelve steps aren't going well for Victor and more often then not he finds himself having random trysts with his fellow group members. By day Victor works a dead-end job in one of those obnoxious colonial village reenactments with his best friend Denny, a compulsive masturbator. As if Victor doesn't have enough issues, he also has a demented mother in a very expensive nursing home. In order to pay the bills, Victor needs to generate a little extra income. He does this by choking on food at expensive restaurants. The people who save him begin to feel responsible for him and frequently send him money after he complains about his various (fictional) financial woes and (fictional) health problems.

Yes, this movie is fucked up.

Things begin to change for Victor when he meets his mother's new doctor, Paige Marshall. Victor finds himself genuinely attracted to her, something he doesn't quite know how to deal with. Furthermore Paige is helping Victor to extract an important piece of information from his ailing mother: the identity of his real father. A mid-film plot twist reveals that Victor may be a half-clone of Jesus Christ himself, the second coming.

Seriously.

Content with being a lousy human being, Victor is horrified when his selfish deeds are revealed to be acts of great kindness and self-sacrifice when reinterpreted in the light of his possible heritage (Victor's choking scam genuinely helps his patrons, his offhand medical advice to strangers has saved lives, etc). Victor must then come to terms with the fact that he might just be a good person after all... perhaps even the best person there ever was.

Ok, so I understand that someone who is not familiar with Palahniuk's work might be turned off by what seems like a ludicrous plot, but the story operates on multiple levels. One the one hand you can view it simply for the comedy; the sex scenes are hilarious, as is every single moment spent in the colonial village while Victor and Denny infuriate their boss (played by director Clark Gregg) who takes historical reenactment far too seriously. Sam Rockwell is perfectly cast as Victor Mancini. As a matter of fact, I actually pictured him in the role when I read the book long before the film version was even announced. Similarly, Angelica Houston is almost regal as Victor's mother, a woman who, though frail now, was once strong and majestic in her own twisted, drug-fueled way. Freud would have a field day examining the complexities of their relationship. Beyond this, Choke deals with themes of redemption and salvation, various conceptions of love, self-determination of identity, and as always, the dark underside of society that most of us pretend does not exist. Ultimately though, Choke is one very twisted romantic comedy, and that's just the way I like it.

This indie film is only open in limited release, so it's not able to pull in huge Hollywood-style numbers. Nevertheless, you should go and see it. If you don't we may never see adaptations of some of Chuck's other work which most definitely deserves to be seen on the big screen. I'm thinking first and foremost about Invisible Monsters (a model gets her jaw shot off by a sniper and escapes from the hospital to join up with a tranny named Brandy Alexander and her traveling troupe of drag queens) and Survivor (the only survivor of a kool-aid death cult works a suicide hotline and ultimately becomes a celebrity self-help guru).

What Would Jesus NOT Do?