Sunday, September 28, 2008
A+E, Movies, Reviews

Choking hazard

Black comedy likely to stimulate your gag reflex

BY STEVE MURRAY

 “Choke” bites. This adaptation of one of Chuck Palahniuk’s faux-macho books proves that it takes a great director and top-shelf cast to make his absurd plots and characters seem, well, less absurd. Or even believable for half a second.

With “Fight Club,” director David Fincher, Brad Pitt and Edward Norton cooked up a gleefully nihilistic vision that, despite its extremes and tangents, struck a genuine chord for worker-bee guys feeling neutered in the age of IKEA. 
 
Here, actor-writer Clark Gregg makes a limp directing debut, delivering a tale that has no message besides, maybe, “Hey, gullible young-dude reader, ain’t this high-lay-rious?” “Choke” comes across like a strung-together series of snarky half-ideas Palahniuk doodled on airport-bar napkins.

As in “Fight Club,” the story leans for shorthand laughs on the world of 12-step groups. This time it’s a sex-addiction circle Victor (Sam Rockwell, valiant but doomed) attends—mainly to pound out quickies in the bathroom with a nympho named Nico while the others remain in their folding chairs, sharing anecdotes about their kinks. 

For his day job, Victor works at one of those colonial theme parks, wearing a ribbon in his hair and addressing everyone as “thee.” (Except he doesn’t, right? Because he’s a rebel and stuff.) He used to be a med student, see, but he dropped out to pay the mental-hospital bills for his mom (Anjelica Huston). When he goes to visit her, she thinks he’s her dead lawyer Fred. And all the addled old ladies at the hospital think he’s assorted men from their early years, who bedded them or diddled with their “woo-woos.”

So why is this thing called “Choke”? Because every now and then Victor lodges a wad of grub in his throat at a restaurant, so some good Samaritan can give him the Heimlich (and their undying love, and often cash).

Oh yeah, and there’s this subplot about Jesus’ foreskin, and the frisky female doctor (or is she a doctor?) who wants to try to cure Victor’s mom via stem-cell research. Only the doc insists that she needs original embryonic cells to work with, which she can only acquire if Victor has sex with her in the hospital chapel.

No, seriously.

On the page, this all might have had a cracked kind of energy, maybe even its own sort of logic. Onscreen, it’s all arch, emotionally disconnected and amateurish. Rockwell and Huston act their hearts out, but they can’t rescue the story from its epic facetiousness. An overlong pageant of phoniness and fakery, “Choke” treats the audience like the gullible schmucks who fall for Victor’s gagging routine. 1.5 STARS