Choke

Sometimes it's difficult to decide how to approach a review — from a personal standpoint, or from the collective shoes of the audience the movie's made for (aka, "The Audience")? When it's based on a favorite book, should a critic nitpick? Should we dare to compare? After all, a book and a movie are two entirely different things.

In the case of Choke, since I absorbed the movie so much from my own personal view and emotion, and having enjoyed author Chuck Palahniuk's reading of the audiobook so immensely, I've decided to make this more of an editorial review than an official evaluation as a standalone. It's not fair. (It's also not fair that this review is appearing at horror.com — but it's evident that genre fans tend to gravitate toward the author's work.)

Anarchist novelist Palahniuk's second leap from page to screen — his first was Fight Club, directed by David Fincher and written for the screen by Jim Uhls — is an audacious, high-minded story that's been wrestled to the ground and beaten into pedestrian submission by writer/director Clark Gregg.

In this humdrum conundrum, Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell) is a sex-addicted, chunk-choking, oedipal-addled historical tour guide who's just trying to make sense of his life. He's Holden Caulfield all grown up, and all fucked up. He thinks he's found the answer to his considerable problems in group therapy and Jesus Christ, but as it turns out he's just an atheist with no invisible means of support — and that's a bitch. So is his demented mother, Ida (Anjelica Huston), who refuses to recognize him: literally. When Victor clocks out from his job at the Colonial theme park and goes to visit his mom at the local laughing academy, all she does is reject his love and spit out the handpicked Italian cuisine he brings for her.

While Ida is spewing her cannelloni, Victor is choking on his. It's a sweet racket: While dining at the finest 5-stars in town with his best bud Denny (Brad William Henke), Victor will suddenly start to gag. Everyone in the restaurant is on alert: Who will be his savoir? Not the bus boy. Not the Swatch-wearing 20-something. Yes: the ageing gentleman in the expensive suit! Let the Heimlich games begin.

"Once somebody saves your life," says Victor in voiceover, "They feel responsible for you." Cut to Victor and Denny at home with a stack of letters and cards, each stuffed with cash and checks and well-wishes from those who've rescued him over the years. Victor is like their own personal "Starving Child" salve — he's actually doing these would-be Sally Struthers' a favor.

At least, that's how it seems in the novel. In the movie, Victor comes off as scheming, skeevy and heartless, even though it's made clear the money does go to pay his mother's hospital bills. In the book, you really couldn't tell if Ida was actually totally sane and just faking it, but the movie just makes her seem loony and lost. I prefer the swapped dynamic of the book's characters to how they're portrayed in the film.

Even though Rockwell and Huston are both amazing actors and have impressively and convincingly played characters you never would have expected of them (Rockwell as Chuck Barris in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, and Huston as a nun in The Darjeeling Limited), the two talents seem just slightly miscast here.

While there is plenty of lunacy to go around, Choke's pictorial style is disappointingly drab. With a story that's so inherently over the top, you need to match it in the visual department, not downplay it.

I understand that not every adaptation of tragiosatirist Palahniuk's work will be as arresting and astonishing as 1999's Fight Club, but Fincher really had a grasp of the author's words and knew how to make them translate properly for film. Even though this only the second movie made from one of his books, it's easy to see that Palahniuk's likely to be the next Vonnegut, Burrows or Thompson in this regard.

Gregg does an adequate job (and he's terrific in his small acting role as Victor's hardline boss, Lord High Charlie), but I would have liked to have seen someone like Timor Bekmambatov or Mary Harron take this sick puppy on and give the flick a real kick. (I am aware that Choke is a low-budget indie, but necessity is often the mother of invention — and I didn't see that here.)

Palahniuk prefaces his book with a bit of advice: "If you are going to read this, don't bother. After a couple of pages, you won't want to be here. So forget it. Go away. Get out while you are still in one piece. Save yourself." My own advice is a little less-dire: Read Choke first — or better yet: pick up the audio CD, read by the author—, then proceed with caution to the cinema.

= = =

Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson