Choke – Review
- Directed by Clark Gregg
- Starring Sam Rockwell, Anjelica Huston, Brad William Henke, Kelly Macdonald and Gillian Jacobs
- Adapted by Clark Gregg himself (who also appears as the leader of the Colonial Village in the film), Choke is a pretty faithful adaptation of the novel by Fight Club author Chuck Palahniuk.
Victor Mancini (Rockwell) is a med school dropout who has numerous problems in his life. He’s a sex addict who isn’t all that interested in recovery; his main reason for going to meetings is the crazy sex he’s getting with another member of his group. He works at a one of those Colonial village places, under the Ëœrule’ of High Lord Charlie (Gregg), a tyrannical boss who threatens to banish he and his buddy (and fellow sex addict) Denny (Henke) for constantly breaking character while on duty in the village. Victor scrapes by as best he can, supplementing his mother Ida’s (Huston) rising medical bills by choking in restaurants.
In Victor’s explanation, he gives people the opportunity to be a hero, and as in some cultures where you save a life and it belongs to you, he see to it that they know how much their efforts mean to him. This means a constant chain of mail being exchanged and his saviors sending him small amounts of cash for this or that ailment that he’s mentioned in his letters. He uses all of this to try and keep Ida in a private facility rather than a state home, all the time hoping against hope that her deteriorating mental health will hold out long enough for him to learn more about his origins.
Ida’s history of mental illness has meant a string of foster homes for Victor, and now she refuses to even recognize him as himself, instead mistaking him for a series of old acquaintances when he visits her. She mentions something about Vic’s father not being the traveling salesman she always said he was, leaving Victor quite desperate to keep her alive long enough to find out who his father was.
Enter a young doctor named Paige Marshall (Macdonald), who takes an interest in Victor and his mother’s case, and eventually proposes a rather unorthodox treatment involving stem cell research that could help Ida regain her faculties. Victor has been trying to screw her since he met her, and is now confronted with the fact that he actually likes her and can’t perform when she tries to seduce him in an effort to conceive a child, from which she can extract the needed tissue. Denny on the other hand has made a breakthrough in his own recovery and begun dating a rather dim but sweet stripper named Cherry Daquiri , nee Beth (Jacobs), which throws Victor into more turmoil as his web of debauchery seems to be snapping all around him.
Victor’s frequent visits to his mother in the hospital have also exposed him to all of the other mentally troubled people in the facility, who have approached him with their various problems, accusing him of this or that because they’ve mistaken him for someone from their past. Victor has finally started agreeing with them out of frustration, and at times apologizing for whatever wrong they’ve suffered, giving these damaged folks closure on their lives, a move which will return to haunt him later, as no good deed goes unpunished.
Victor finally uses Denny to impersonate himself, and Ida buys it, speaking to Denny about his origins, all of which she recorded in her diary that’s in storage back at Victor’s house. Victor rushes home, only to find the diary written in Italian, his mother’s native language. Paige offers to translate, and what she tells him is thoroughly shocking, given the course of Victor’s life thus far, and he begins to really rebel against what he thinks is his destiny.
There are some truly bizarre twists still to come, and I was really surprised to see that all of the vivid deviant details of the book have been translated into the film, there are certain bits I was sure would be lost in the translation, but I’ll be damned if they’re not here in all their twisted glory. I mean, they kept the bit with the ben-wah balls, I’m impressed.
Rockwell’s voiceover works well, establishing the sarcastic nature of a character who knows how flawed he is, but is just trying to get by. The script tones down Victor and Denny calling each other ËœDude’ every other word, which is actually refreshing, the book almost drove me mad with that repetition, and I lived in fear that I would start doing it myself in casual conversation.
I really loved the film, the black humor works really well, and it’s a strikingly faithful adaptation of the novel. I enjoyed this more than anything I’ve seen in quite some time, and I could easily re-watch it again today.
Highly recommended.
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