‘Choke’ bites off more than it can chew

Choke
Review by Nathan Weinbender

“Choke” is a movie with some very good ideas, but it needed some more—and I cringe as I write this—restraint. I cringe mostly because the film was clearly made with the intention of being cheerfully unrestrained and unapologetically raunchy. It was, after all, adapted from a novel by cult (the ads use the word “incendiary”) author Chuck Palahniuk, whose last book concerned an aging porn queen boinking six hundred men on camera. Prudence be damned!

But the raunch isn’t the problem with “Choke.” It’s the story, which probably worked better on the page, where it had time to expand and breathe. Within the confines of 89 minutes, it feels hurried, precarious, busy, unwieldy.

It stars Sam Rockwell, one of Hollywood’s best working character actors, as Victor Mancini, a sex addict who attends support groups and sneaks out early to fornicate with relapsing prostitutes in the bathroom. He’s on a four-step recovery program, but he can’t seem to progress past that fourth step.

Victor works at a historical reenactment theme park with his friend Denny (Brad William Henke), a chronic masturbator. He’s a frequent visitor at the nursing home where his mother (Anjelica Huston) fades away with dementia, and he imagines the elderly female patients without their tops on. He’s made it with all of the nurses but one, Paige (Kelly Macdonald), who is mousy and soft-spoken and approaches Victor with bemusement.

The movie gets its title from another of Victor’s pastimes, which is deliberately choking on food in posh restaurants and being saved by Good Samaritans who give him the Heimlich. Such a practice is justified, ya see, because by allowing people to save his life, Victor is bolstering their self-confidence. Plus, if he picks his victims right, Victor generally gets sympathy money in the mail.

There are some wonderfully demented bits in “Choke,” but too much of it feels like extra weight. The scenes set at work, Victor’s choking fits and his relationship with his fellow sex addicts could each have inspired their own movie, but here they’re barely explored. The script, written by director and co-star Clark Gregg, tantalizes us with potentially intriguing material (I’d like to know more about the victims that fall prey to Victor’s choking schemes), but it pulls back on the reins before those subplots ever fully take shape.

Rockwell is very good here, smirky and smarmy and sleazy, and he has the perfect off-kilter delivery for the role. How many actors could properly convey the emotions of a man who may be the byproduct of a DNA sample taken from the holiest of foreskins? He breathes life into the material. And Anjelica Huston is simply heartbreaking as Victor’s mother—once a thief and a con artist, now slowly succumbing to Alzheimer’s.

Her scenes with Rockwell are sublime. She no longer recognizes Victor, confusing him with old lovers from her past. Victor plays along, taking on the persona of Frank or Bob. Those scenes, gentle and quiet, are so well-written and so wonderfully acted that they upstage the salacious, crass material surrounding them. They provide the only glimmer of humanity in this otherwise smug, intermittently amusing picture.

Grade: C+

Directed and written by Clark Gregg. Based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk. Starring Sam Rockwell, Anjelica Huston, Kelly Macdonald, Brad William Henke, Clark Gregg, Bijou Phillips and Joel Grey. R; 89m.