Sundance ’08: Choke

*½/****
starring Sam Rockwell, Anjelica Huston, Kelly Macdonald, Brad Henke
screenplay by Clark Gregg, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk
directed by Clark Gregg

by Alex Jackson Choke lost me in the very first scene. The hero, Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell), is at a support group for sex addicts and describing all the regulars for us. There's the housewife who put mayonnaise on her crotch for her dog to lick off. There's the guy who had to have a gerbil removed from his anus. And then there's the cheerleader who needed a stomach pump after swallowing too much semen. I want to talk about the cheerleader. I think Victor said that doctors pumped two quarts out of her stomach. Considering the amount of semen in a typical human ejaculation is about 1.5 to 5 millilitres, that's a lot of blowjobs! Two quarts is around two litres, right? So she would've had to service at least 400 men. Assuming this would take about three minutes apiece, she'd have to have been at it for twenty hours straight, without vomiting up or digesting any of the semen–which, by the way, is completely non-toxic and would not require the use of a stomach pump–in the meantime. What kind of dipshit expects me to buy this? I admit I haven't read Chuck Palahniuk's source novel. I might very well be alone on this–the critics at my press screening were buzzing with anticipation and the gang over at my message board instantly recognized the title.

I'd like to think something was lost in translation, but it seems Palahniuk deserves a fair share of the blame for what goes wrong with the film. Choke regurgitates the satire on support groups and airplane-etiquette gags from Fight Club, employs a bit of dollarbook Freud by sourcing Victor's intimacy problems back to mommy, and sloppily works in the suggestion that Victor is a partial clone of Jesus Christ. (How hip, edgy, and irreverent!) But it's more than that: just as Towelhead was no American Beauty without Sam Mendes, Choke is no Fight Club without David Fincher. A truly visionary filmmaker, Fincher was able to transform Palahniuk's petty, self-congratulatory sarcasm into the evolved and thorny hyperrealism that would go on to characterize the cinema of the early twenty-first century. In the hands of writer-director Clark Gregg, this material is transformed into just another quirky coming-of-age story in the vein of Napoleon Dynamite. The film has exactly two redeeming features. The first is Sam Rockwell. He's damn good, successfully fusing his character with his persona while compromising neither Victor's repulsiveness nor his own likable vulnerability. The second is the last shot of the film. Through what might be one of history's longest screen kisses, we see Victor making love instead of fucking for what appears to be the first time in his life. To quote Death Proof's Stuntman Mike, that's so sweet it makes sugar taste just like salt.