Choking Man

I just saw this film at the Miami International Film Festival and felt compelled to recommend it. The story revolves around an unconventional protagonist in the form of a diner dishwasher that struggles with debilitating shyness. It's a poignant piece that wonderfully highlights a complexity and depth of character in unlikely lead roles that might otherwise be considered too simple to be subjects of a feature film. The film does this while avoiding any temptation of showing its characters as blissfully simple and idyllic which conveys a realism that is appreciated and, for me, made the film a pleasure to enjoy. The characters have strengths and weaknesses and they share the same emotional influences that make us all both heroes and villains in one mind and body.

I was going thru the cable guide one Saturday night, and I added a bunch of indie films from Sundance and IFC to my DVR record list. I recorded a few movies, and tonight I watched the first- Choking Man. It's the story of an Ecuadorian dishwasher working at a small diner in Queens who suffers from severe social anxiety and falls in love with a new Chinese waitress.

The film is well made, the director knew what he was doing and the DP did a very nice job of making it all look fantastic. The action was broken up by scenes of animation dominated by bunny rabbits and other odd stuff. Those animated sequences were dream-like, and it all blended together nicely.

The music was really fantastic- a lot of bells, toy piano sounding stuff, slow yet flowing music that added a nice depth to the action on screen. The music was a character in itself in some places, used aptly to convey a whole slew of emotions that a lot of the character themselves never portrayed all that strongly.

The movie overall- not all that great. The main character, Jorge who supposedly suffers from morbid shyness…well, he came off as retarded. You would meet someone like this and wonder if there was something wrong with them mentally. Shyness is one thing, but refusing to even look at people or say anything to them when they ask you a question- I've never encountered anyone like that, and if I did I'd probably just assume they suffer from mental retardation and leave it at that.

The problem with this movie is that Jorge isn't just unlikeable. He's worse. He's annoying. He's SO weird you don't really care what happens to him. I'm sure people like him exist in this world, but they're so far out on the periphery that in a film like this- he almost seems completely fake. The guy just comes off so badly to me that I didn't even want to see him. I would have rather watched scenes from any other character in this movie, as long as Jorge never showed his face.

That is a major problem for me, and one that cannot be overcome. It's the film's downfall. That and it was weird. There are a number of very odd things that happen in the movie and don't make a lot of sense. Someone will try to say it's deep and thoughtful, and that I just didn't get it. If so- I say 'oh well.' I certainly won't cry over that.

Independent, low budget movies are my favorites. Movies about characters more than what they do are my favorites. Gritty movies set in gritty locations are my favorites. Movies in which almost nothing happens are my favorites. Movies filmed in New York are my favorites because New York is my home and my favorite place on earth. So I had great expectations for Choking Man, because it looked like it had nearly everything I love most in a movie. Man, was I disappointed!

This is a phony, manipulative and unrelentingly annoying movie. It's as phony, manipulative and unrelentingly annoying as a 1980s sitcom with a too-loud laugh track. Every character is a caricature: the dumb immigrant is EXTREMELY dumb; the old, brassy, heart-of-gold waitress is EXTREMELY brassy and gold-hearted; the gruff diner owner with a heart of gold is EXTREMELY gruff and gold-hearted; the obnoxious Irish bully is EXTREMELY obnoxious; the sweet Chinese girl is so sweet she made my teeth hurt. There is not one believable human being in the whole cast. I hated this movie.

People who go on and on about how great this movie is must love American television, because that's exactly where this movie belongs, as a TV movie on the Hallmark Channel or Lifeline or even on NBC or ABC or Fox. It takes all the things that can make a movie great and cheapens and twists them into a revolting, irritating glob of phony, rigged, forced emotionalism. This is no quirky, gritty, unconventional independent masterpiece. It is as predictable and conventional and crummy and corny and irritating as an episode of The Waltons.

Jorge (Octavio Gómez Berríos) is a horribly shy Ecuadorian dishwasher, working at Olympic Diner, your average, scuzzy diner in Jamaica, New York. The owner of the diner, Rick (Mady Patinkin), informs us early in the film that more languages are spoken per square foot in Jamaica, New York than in any other place in the world. Jamaica represents the salad-bowl theory of sociological study, where numerous cultures will come together but also kind of segregate themselves to their own little area to function rather than to merge together (the melting-pot theory in contrast).

Jorge is one of those quiet guys that still somehow manages to attract the attention of loud guys, specifically Jerry (Aaron Paul), an obnoxious white guy who consistently finds ways to immaturely tease Jorge while he is simply trying to wash his current dishes and move on to the next set. Jorge eventually connects (not talks to) with his coworker Amy (Eugenia Yuan), an attractive Chinese waitress, who finds her talkative personality in grave contrast from his silent and restrained one. For the next eighty-three minutes, we become the fly on the wall, intimately watching these characters interact with each other and form relationships inside this sleazy diner.

Steve Barron's Choking Man gets its title from (a) its climax and (b) the fact that Jorge always washes dishes in front of the Heimlich Maneuver instructional poster that establishments are required to post. The commonality between both Jorge and the instructional poster is that they're both metaphors for something, be it immigration, loneliness, or something even deeper, and it's something I can't figure out. The ambiguity in Choking Man seems to exist to provide another layer to an already simple story that didn't need to be infused with symbology nor added mystique especially at the distracting level to which writer/director Barron employs the elements.

For example, Jorge may represent the commonplace mindset of an immigrant which is to take a day at a time, do your work to the best of your abilities, avoid conflict, and move on, while Amy could be representative of an immigrant getting involved in the American culture, surrounding herself with people of the land. One of two perspectives are likely embraced by immigrants and Choking Man shows this effectively. However, the film doesn't give these immigrants defining characteristics. We end up defining them by their social status and their jobs rather than on their personalities.

Barron's choice to leave these characters largely empty and unexplored, especially his lead, which the film rests on, leaves the film rather unsteady Jorge, in particular feels more like a metaphorical representation of something larger than his character could ever be, which only seems to throw another wrench in the film's plan.

Choking Man is a stranger project for director Barron - a down-tempo, mood-piece by a director who specialized in directing off-the-wall music videos for bands like a-Ha in the eighties and the nineties. Here, he slows down his directorial speed like he went from hauling freight in city streets to cruising on lonely country roads. This is an assured change, as well, for we can how Barron makes a film with a hugely relevant topic and fuels the project with symbology and quiet melodrama. The result is a mildly engaging, however, unfocused drama, which wastes its ability to say something with its constant surrealist animations that pop up, hoping to allow the viewers to connect with Jorge more than they already have. Much like Jorge's surface personality, though, his mental personality isn't much more engaging and further alienates.

Starring: Octavio Gómez Berríos, Eugenia Yuan, Aaron Paul, and Mady Patinkin. Directed by: Steve Barron.

I appreciated this film a lot. The focus of the story is a quiet, shy person named Jorge who has a connection with a new waitress at the diner where he works as a dishwasher. Every night, he goes home to a small sad apartment where a man "lives". Note: in my opinion, this man is a hallucination, and Jorge likely has some serious PTSD or other debilitating psychological problem.

His problem is an allegory for the choking man.

At one "explosive" point in the movie, he does something that frees him, and he banishes his demons. However, working up to that point, he appears painfully shy, possibly homicidal at times (because he cannot express what he wants to say/do) and at the very least very angry or desperate. But how he reacts is to quietly observe, dash away, hide, and wait to be found.

I loved the story unfolding, I loved the odd daydream-like animations (note, many of the animations flow into "demon" shapes, and his hallucinatory "roommate" has some perverse sexual imagery that Jorge tries hard to block out, but the animations are otherwise about bunnies and sweet things.) Score is great, as has been mentioned.

I thought this actor was extraordinarily good with a part that has very little speaking. This is a guy who can act with this eyes. Supporting cast is appropriate, desperate, have small stories that are additive and round it out.

Good film if you like awkward, flawed characters. It's just stories about sweet, flawed folks playing out over a Thanksgiving. That's what was so great. I don't think the fact that many are "immigrants" is important in the story, they just happen to have accents, and it adds to the sweetness.