Choke

Choke-2008

When you hear the description of the newest film adaptation of the work of the author of 'Fight Club", Chuck Palahniuk, the first words that come to mind probably are not going to be sweet, romantic or sympathetic. Yet, by the end of Choke, a very dark comedy, those are exactly the adjectives that will pop up.

Vincent Mancini (Sam Rockwell) is not meant to be a likable guy. Mancini is not only a sex-addicted, Colonial-interpreter, he also chokes in restaurants to earn money and to have strangers save him. When he is not suffocating for scratch or picking up ladies in the bathroom outside the sex addiction meetings, he is visiting his Alzheimer's affected mother Ida (Anjelica Huston) at her expensive nursing home and trying to keep his best friend Denny from being put in the stocks at work. his normal routine is ruined though by the appearance of his mother's new nurse, Paige Marshall (Kelly Macdonald), who not only does Victor start to fall for, but also has some interesting ideas on how to save his mother and just who exactly Victor's father is.

Sam Rockwell has never been a stranger to sleazeball characters. In films like Confessions of A Dangerous Mind and The Green Mile, Rockwell always played the sort of dirtbag character. But in Choke, he is at the same time, despicable, lovable and misunderstood. In between Choke and Snow Angels, which was released earlier this year, this could be a breakthrough year for Rockwell. Recently, Anjelica Huston has taken to playing dysfunctional mother types in the Wes Anderson films The Royal Tenenbaums and The Darjeeling Limited. Yet with the character of Ida, much like Rockwell, she has to walk that line of being completely unlikable and sympathetic. Like Rockwell, she pulls it off and remarkably so. Kelly Macdonald of last year's best picture winner, No County For Old Men, does an even more incredible job in Choke. As Marshall, she is a hard character to pin down, but MacDonald's excellently layered performance shows that there is much more to her character than what is on the surface.

The story is as weird as they came and as it progresses, it can only get weirder, which it does. Yet director/writer/actor Clark Gregg has a method to this madness and tells Mancini's story as a patchwork of his life, showing who he is now and what made him this way perfectly. Gregg makes an interesting re-envisioning of Choke by taking the source material and making it substantially better. He does what every good book adaptation should do: take out what does not work, enhance what did work and develop the characters to an even further level. Gregg is able to take Palahniuk's characters and flesh them out more and make them even more interesting then they were to begin with.

No one tells a story of makes unusual characters quite like Palahniuk. Yet audiences looking for Fight Club 2 will be disappointed. While it does deal with some of the abandonment issues and trolling self-help clinic like Fight Club, the similarities pretty much end there. However, while it sounds out there, Choke surprisingly, at its core, is a love story, between Vincent and his family, friends and new loves in his life. Like the people that save Vincent from choking, Vincent attempts to fix his problems with himself and the people in his life and becomes a story of finding salvation in himself and others. Like Vincent, on the outside, Choke may seem dirty, but their truly is a extraordinarily engaging and likable story on the inside.

Photo from Cinematical.com