Director Clark Gregg made tidy work of a complex film, and he deserves a hot load of credit for this one. The story is a perverse path through the colorful world of sexual compulsion/obsession, self-induced choking and Colonial theme parks, with a side order of a mother/son story too weird not to see for yourself. Thanks in no small part to Gregg and an impressively versatile cast, the book comes to life onscreen, and Choke has successfully managed to stay out of that all-too-common 'The book was so much better’ category.
Choke's self-antagonizing protagonist, Victor Mancini (played to shaggy perfection by Sam Rockwell) is a sex-addicted med-school dropout who pays the bills for his wildly deranged mother Ida's (Anjelica Huston) stay in an expensive private medical hospital by working days playing an Irish indentured servant in a Colonial theme park. But that's just his day job. By night, Victor supplements his income by deliberately choking in upscale restaurants, forming parasitic relationships with the well-to-do diners who “save” him.
Victor, frustrated with the shackles his dementia-ridden mother's hospital bills place upon him, is just about ready for her to die. But she's withholding one piece of information from him: the truth about his father. He enlists the help of his best friend Denny (Brad William Henke) and his mother’s attending physician, the beautiful Dr. Paige Marshall (Kelly Macdonald), to solve the mystery before the truth dies with her, but the catches and complications of his accomplices makes for even more trouble.
It should be noted that, roughly halfway into the movie, it's revealed that Victor's mother may or may not have stolen the ancient foreskin of Jesus Christ, cloned his genetic material and was impregnated by it as part of a top-secret genetic engineering experiment. Which, of course, would make Victor the half-Savior son of Christ. This tidbit makes for a few absolutely classic moments in the film, but I won't spoil them for you here.
I knew it was a bad idea to take my mom to this screening. There are all kinds of half gut-busting, half wince-worthy sex scenes in the film (none of which can be described in detail), and it made for a hell of an awkward experience, to say the least. But Choke is a fantastic ride, with a much more prominent comedic streak than I had anticipated. As a huge Palahniuk fan, I was a little wary going into this one. But while it isn't the pop-culture cult relic that Fight Club is, Choke holds its own and doesn't disappoint.
Crave Online Rating: 9 out of 10
