“Choke” Movie Review

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Apr 11, 2008
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 Film Review by :Bryan Fox When watching a film adaptation of a novel you’ve read (and there can be no relevant critique of an adapted film by someone who hasn’t first read the novel), there is really only one significant question to address:  Have the director/producer/screenwriter shown the details they need to show, and left out the ones they didn’t?  Or, to put it another way: could the film be both enjoyable and intelligible for someone who hasn’t already read the novel?  Fight Club, the first Chuck Palahniuk book to hit the big screen, not only fulfilled the promise of the novel, but added to it with sharp, observant dialogue and effective deviations from the work it represented.  To be fair, Palahniuk’s visceral imagery, ribald hi-jinks, and comically ridiculous plot twists will always be difficult to bring to the big screen.  But ten years after Fight Club (yes, it’s already been a decade), could the second adaptation of the author’s work again rise to the challenge?   Choke revolves around Victor Mancini, a sex-addicted protagonist with a job at a hilariously-authentic colonial village (workers are punished for being anachronistic), a penchant for choking on food in restaurants so as to earn people’s sympathy and love (“Somebody saves your life, they’ll love you forever,” Victor quips), and an Alzheimer’s-suffering mother in a nursing home who may or may not still know the truth as to his lineage, something which he desperately wants to know before she succumbs to the disease eating away at her brain.   Sam Rockwell is aptly-cast as Victor, providing enough self-deprecating deadpan and smarmy sexuality to carry off the Palahniuk protagonist trope - the self-loathing anti-hero who, somewhere in his heart, just wants to be loved.  Brad William Henke as Denny, Victor’s Seth-Rogenesque best friend and colonial village cohort, provides the foil to Victor’s inwardly-focused scorn, and Anjelica Huston brings us Ida, Vict
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