Fight Club shouldn’t have worked. Chuck Palahniuk’s writing isn’t really supposed to be filmed. Choke‘s slightly awkward blend of gross-out laughs and uncompromising themes of sex, religion and mental illness shows why.
Adapted by debutant director Clark Gregg from Palahniuk’s 2001 novel, the film follows Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell), a sex-addict whose mother (Anjelica Huston) suffers from dementia. To fund his mother’s psychiatric care, by day he works with his similarly lustful friend Denny (Brad William Henke) at a colonial theme park and by night he scams rich restaurant-goers into giving him cash by intentionally choking on his food and having them ‘save’ him so they form some kind of bond.
Sounds improbable so far? It is. But despite the film’s title, the choking is an almost expendable detail, a recurring skit. Choke is really a twisted love story, centring on Victor’s relationship with a nurse at his mother’s hospital (Kelly Macdonald) and dealing with the fallout when he discovers that his parents really aren’t who he thought they were. At all.
It’s intriguingly off-the-wall stuff, and Palahniuk’s pitch-black worldview means there is plenty here for the brain to chow down on. But there are also segments of the film that treat Victor and Denny’s coitus fixations as the springboard for smutty gags that are occasionally funny, more often misjudged.
A Chuck Palahniuk adap for the Judd Apatow generation then? Possibly… but it’s no Fight Club, and it’s no Superbad either.
