‘Choke’: Hard To Swallow

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We keep waiting for “Choke” to up the ante, to elevate its crude antics into some kind of ethos. Instead, the story keeps asking us to search an emotional vacuum for hints of humanity that simply are not there. It’s almost as if first-time director Clark Gregg failed to sit down with his cast and discuss the tone of the project. As the movie reaches for loony absurdity, the actors play their caricatures with gusto and conviction.

Considering the peculiar particulars of the plot, “Choke,” which opens Friday in the city and is based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk, should add up to something far more scandalous. Victor (Sam Rockwell) is a despicable creature in a nihilistic age. He works at a Colonial theme park, mindlessly going through his days, daydreaming of all the women he hopes to seduce and abandon. He’s the kind of guy who attends therapy for sex addiction not out of a desire to get better (he is a genuine addict), but as a way of capturing easy prey.

Victor doesn’t so much enjoy sex as chase it mindlessly, finding intimacy in far more random, repulsive ways. His strategy is bizarre yet successful: He goes to restaurants, crams food down his throat, induces choking, and waits for a stranger to perform the Heimlich maneuver and save his life. Having fooled the poor sap into caring about him, Victor then milks the bystander for affection and money.

Before we have time to process Victor’s psychoses, “Choke” cops out. We meet his mother, Ida (Anjelica Huston), who is suffering from Alzheimer’s and whose medical bills are escalating. It turns out those bills are the reason Victor needs to raise money from strangers in restaurants. One day, as he visits Ida, Victor meets a doctor named Paige (Kelly Macdonald) and is immediately drawn to her. Here’s a woman he likes so much that he doesn’t want to sleep with her. Talk about the unconventional pickup line.

Ida and Paige help make Victor a more palatable guy, but they are also the characters that help doom “Choke” to mediocrity. If one took anything from the big-screen rendering of Mr. Palahniuk’s “Fight Club,” which eventually became a cult hit, it was that there is an audience for films that explore the extremes of human behavior. In that film, the violence wasn’t softened but exaggerated. The aggressive, angry mind-set of the central characters, who felt detached from their primordial roots, wasn’t softened by making them more likable.

But “Choke” is Palahniuk lite, and a sellout of sorts. Take Victor’s sex addiction. Rather than leading its audience to the brink, where sex is not exciting but burdensome, “Choke” uses Victor’s rendezvous for comedic effect. Rather than follow through on Victor’s choke-for-cash scheme in an effort to deconstruct the way he preys upon the kindness of strangers, “Choke” plays it off as mere goofball antics.

Mr. Rockwell, a fine actor, is finally being offered the parts he deserves. In his most recent outing, “Snow Angels,” he played a cheery but heartbroken psychopath who struggles to keep his marbles together after his wife leaves him. He clings to booze and religion, and eventually settles on a plot for revenge, and the film builds to a provocative climax in which Mr. Rockwell’s character, citing God and accompanying beliefs, levels the gun and executes his betrothed. In “Choke,” the actor makes Victor’s imbalance an endearing flaw, alternating between the actions of a sincere son and the callousness of a bachelor on the prowl. Victor is not a broken soul spiraling into the abyss, but a good boy gone bad. The unlikable is made likable, and it is far less interesting.

By softening Victor’s edges, “Choke” loses its chance to push the boundaries it wants to push and settles for quick and easy punch lines. His grotesque behavior is disguised as shenanigans, and as Paige comes to fall for him, the movie’s eccentricities are pushed aside in favor of a far more standard romantic comedy. “Choke” sold for big bucks at Sundance, meaning Mr. Gregg’s decisions to play it safe and think marketability were rewarded handsomely. Too bad the story wasn’t.

ssnyder@nysun.com


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