Review #1,417: 'Choke' (2008)

If you've ever had the fortune of reading a novel by Chuck Palahniuk, the novelist behind the likes of Fight Club and Invisible Monsters, you'll know that attempting to envision the writer's nihilistic style and sketchy characters for the cinema screen is a monumental task. It takes a master director like David Fincher to make something truly wonderful, as he did with 1999's Fight Club, and to understand that simply plucking the best scenes from the book, stringing them together, and hoping it'll somehow flow, simply won't work. Choke, based on Palahniuk's 2001 novel, is written and directed by Clark Gregg, the actor now best known as Agent Coulson in the Marvel Cinematic Universe and TV's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. It's a commendable effort, and Gregg certainly gives it his all, but Choke is all over the place, and is ultimately forced to hack the complex novel into a collection of vignettes that don't really fit together.

Our protagonist is Victor Mancini, a sex addict and theme park employee whose ultimate goal seems to be to piss off anybody he comes across. His only friend is chronic masturbator Denny (Brad William Henke), a fellow underachiever who is almost saintly when compared to Victor. To his credit, Victor pays frequent visits to his hospitalised mother Ida (Anjelica Huston), although she doesn't recognise him, so Victor spends much of the time pretending to be somebody else or trying to bang any of the many nurses in the ward. If Victor wasn't already loathsome enough, he earns some extra cash on the side by pretending to choke on food at restaurants. The con is that a good Samaritan will perform the Heimlich manoeuvre on the blue-in-the-face stranger, and when the airwaves are clear and the food flies across the room, they will feel responsible for the person they have just saved. As a result, Victor frequently receives cheques from his saviours. In anybody else's hands, Victor would be too much of a scumbag to bear for 90 minutes, but he's played by Sam Rockwell, and the great underappreciated character actor somehow makes him sympathetic.

If Choke sounds like a mess, it's because that's precisely what it is. Along with everything else going on, Victor finds some comfort from the chaos in his life in the form of nurse Paige Marshall (Kelly Macdonald), who comes up with her own theory about Victor's birth when Ida reveals that there's something she hasn't told him. Despite the haphazard nature of the story, Gregg just about pulls it off by getting the very best out of his actors. Rockwell and Huston are fantastic, but that's to be expected. Henke, an actor I don't think I've seen in anything else before, gets a lot of laughs out of his loveable schlub, and is so good that it often feels like his character has the more interesting story to tell. Macdonald is charming as the nurse with her own unique approach to dealing with the strung-out relative of one of her patients, and Gregg himself, in a smaller role as Victor's brown-nosing colleague, is responsible for some of the film's funniest moments. But in the end, that's all that Choke is: a collection of funny moments. It certainly captures the idiosyncratic tone of the novel, but doesn't quite know how to fit it all the pieces together.


Directed by: Clark Gregg
Starring: Sam Rockwell, Anjelica Huston, Kelly Macdonald, Brad William Henke, Paz de la Huerta, Clark Gregg, Bijou Phillips
Country: USA

Rating: ***

Tom Gillespie