There's an elephant in the room, and his name is Tyler Durden. Though the first rule of reviewing "Choke" should be, "You don't talk about 'Fight Club,'" Chuck Palahniuk adaptations come along only once a decade, so it's hard to avoid holding this up against the earlier film. Though this adaptation is slightly more faithful, Clark Gregg's "Choke" does not quite work as a complete movie in the same way Fincher's "Fight Club" (1999) did. Its story is scatterbrained and unfocused, which is disappointing in a movie this short. It does, however, boast a winning cast and enough engaging scenes to make it worth checking out.
Victor Mancini, played pitch-perfectly by the incomparable Sam Rockwell, is a sex addict who fakes choking in public restaurants in order to be saved by wealthy diners who then become his patrons; they send him money for his fabricated medical problems. He then uses this money to keep his mother, played by the underutilized but still great Anjelica Huston, in a nursing home under the dubious care of Dr. Marshall, played by Kelly Macdonald, who is as good as she was in last year's "No Country for Old Men."
If this sounds like a lot to keep up with, please bear in mind that Victor and his best friend, a compulsive masturbator played reliably by Brad William Henke, work full-time at a colonial re-enactment park (think Colonial Williamsburg) run by a straight-laced and earnest re-enactor played by Gregg. Oh, and it's possible that Victor is related to Jesus.
While this all plays out fairly extensively in the book, the movie just feels crowded whenever it strays from its most fertile areas, such as Victor's strained relationship with his mother and the growing distance between himself and his friend Denny (Henke). Gregg, an ardent fan of the book, struggled for years to bring it to screen, and his devotion may be what holds the movie back. He reverently includes as many plotlines and one-off scenes as he can, but the result feels meandering.
It's not just that "Choke" is itself one of Palahniuk's least focused books; Gregg seems not to have been interested in establishing a solid thread of story throughout the film. The closest it gets to coherence is Victor's sex addiction, something he battles throughout the movie and that ebbs and changes with his character development. But watching a man reach Step Four ("Moral Inventory") of the Twelve Steps is not quite enough to hold a movie together.
That aside, Victor Mancini is a well-realized character, and Rockwell brings along the compulsively sleazy likeability he brought to Chuck Barris in "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind" (2002). The various women in Victor's life, especially his mother and Dr. Marshall, are played by very qualified and strong actors, which is why their roles in the movie are rather unfortunate. Like "Fight Club," "Choke" is primarily about men who are terrified of women and cannot bring themselves to consider them peers.
Unlike "Fight Club," however, "Choke" leaves a lot of leeway for development of these female characters and at least a greater exploration of the effect they have on the lives of the men in whom Palahniuk finds himself most interested. Gregg's film fails here, due in part to its overcrowding. The already paltry role of Victor's mother is rather shrunk and compressed -- a good choice in general, but an unfortunate one for Ms. Huston.
As to the sex in this film, which seeps in at the corners of the movie as it does Victor's brain, it is handled a little over-tastefully. Gregg seems afraid of offending his audience, and as a result, the compulsive activities of the protagonist are barely more explicit than the opening montage of "Wedding Crashers" (2005). Victor buries his face into a few white ladies' chests, but none of the various scenes of sexuality carry with them the uncomfortable and pleasureless need described within the book. Only Victor's rare orgasms convey his depressing inability to say no.
In spite of its flaws, it's difficult to dislike "Choke." Like Victor himself, the movie is genial in spite of itself. Almost every scene is enjoyable enough, and the dialogue is casually vulgar in an honest and funny way. It won't bear repeat viewings, but that's no reason not to see it once. Even though it's a lot to swallow, this film goes down easy.
