Choke

Clark Gregg’s adaptation of Chuck "Fight Club" Palahniuk’s darkly comic novel starts off well and continues that way for quite a while before stalling.

Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell) works as a costumed lackey in a colonial era theme park, runs a scam to keep his mother (Anjelica Huston) in an expensive nursing home and is a sex addict, like his best friend and work colleague, Denny (Brad William Henke). One day while visiting his mother, Victor meets a new doctor, Paige Marshall (Kelly McDonald), at the hospital and begins to reflect on the cause, which he firmly believes is his crazy mother, of his inability to genuinely feel anything for anyone,

The first half or so of Choke has much that amuses. Rockwell is a dab hand at playing smart-ass characters and his double act with Henke as a pair of chronic under-achievers provides plenty of chuckle. However, once Victor meets the lady doctor who quickly sees through him and thus robs him of his sexual potency there is a need for an evolution in his character that never comes (so to speak).

Rockwell is not an actor who does depth and whether because of that or because of Gregg's script not giving him a chance to, Victor doesn’t develop in any meaningful way (one might compare Rockwell's character to that of Bill Murray's in Groundhog Day for an indication of what is lacking) and the film starts to reiterate itself (a scene in which Victor plays out a woman's rape fantasy is singularly ill-judged).  Denny pretty much drops out of the picture and with it most of the good-natured albeit largely sex-fixated humour.  What we are left with are Victor’s bitter confusion and the rather underwhelmingly-presented relationship between Victor, his dying mother (the flashbacks to Victor childhood are none too well executed with Huston looking particularly unconvincing as the much younger mother) and Dr Marshall.  Gradually the film putters to a crawl before coming to a stop with a tacked-on happyish ending and we hop off asking ourselves, "what was that about?".

 

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