SXSW Movie Review: Choke
After watching Choke, an adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s (Survivor, Fight Club) novel directed by Clark Gregg, the words vulgar, crude, profane, blasphemous, obscene, and, best of all, hilarious, all come to mind. A sharp critique aimed at our self-centered, self-absorbed culture, with a few digs at group therapy, psychiatry, and dysfunctional parenting, Choke is the kind of film that can be only made outside the Hollywood system, then gets picked up by a Hollywood-based distributor after it becomes a hit with festival audiences and critics, as Choke did at the Sundance Film Festival two months ago. Choke was picked up by Fox Searchlight, with a released planned for late August, a lucky month for them (Napoleon Dynamite, Little Miss Sunshine were both released in August).
Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell) has a problem, actually many, many problems. Victor numbs himself with meaningless sex with a random assortment of women, young, middle-aged, beautiful, and not-beautiful, then shows up for his weekly group therapy for sex addicts. When he’s not pursuing women with his fellow sex addict and best friend, Denny (Brad William Henke), he’s working as a “historical interpreter” (i.e., tour guide) at a Colonial-era amusement park. Frequent run-ins with his boss, Lord High Charlie (Clark Gregg), who takes the Colonial experience far too seriously, don’t help much. Worse, Victor’s mother, Ida (Anjelica Huston), a former grifter who made Victor’s life extremely difficult, has been hospitalized with Dementia and the prognosis is far from good.
To cover the costs of the expensive private facility that’s caring for his mother, Victor runs a scam on unsuspecting restaurant patrons: he chokes on food, hoping one of them, preferably someone with money and a conscience will “save” him. Once they save him, he has them on the hook, frequently contacting them with requests for money to pay his bills or cover fictitious medical procedures (money he dutifully sends to the private hospital). Everything changes for Victor (as it should) when he meets Paige Marshall (Kelly Macdonald), a seemingly brilliant doctor who suggests a novel, experimental procedure for saving Ida from Alzheimer’s and dying prematurely. And that’s all before an out-of-left-field twist about Victor’s paternal identity presents itself, upending Victor’s views of who he is and who he wants to be.
If you’ve read or seen the film adaptation of Fight Club, then Choke is more of the same: sharp social and cultural critique delivered through scabrous, scatological, offensive, outrageous humor, all in service of whatever themes Palahniuk wants to express. Not surprisingly for a novelist for whose work pushes boundaries hard, adaptations of his work run the risk of appealing to only a small segment of moviegoers or a larger segment, but only if the adapters water it down it considerably. The latter happened here, at least where the ending is concerned (expect something wholly different from the novel). The new ending fits the film adaptation, but it veers far from the novel’s Old Testament-style ending. But that’s a minor problem for Palahniuk’s fans (or it should be) and a non-problem for moviegoers new to Palahniuk’s novels or Fight Club (all five of you).
Unfortunately, Choke has none of Fight Club’s hyperactive visual style. Gregg doesn’t have David Fincher’s (Zodiac, Panic Room, Se7en) talent or skill as a director, but he also didn’t have Fight Club’s budget or Brad Pitt/Ed Norton-level stars. What Gregg does have, though, is a talented cast in the always underrated Sam Rockwell, excellent here as the emotionally damaged, amoral sex addict/con man Victor, Angelica Huston as his grifter mother, sweet and loving one moment, emotionally manipulative the next, Kelly McDonald, a Scottish actress memorable in No Country for Old Men who’s just as good here showing solid range, and Brad William Henke as Victor’s best friend and fellow screw-up/sex addict, who does the big man/wounded vulnerability bit convincingly.
Cloverfield Director Matt Reeves Already Talking Sequel!
“Look! What is that?!….Why, it’s the Hollywood System!”
Haven’t seen the first Cloverfield yet? Well, get to it kiddo, because Cloverfield 2 has already been discussed, according to the probable smash hit’s director Matt Reeves.
“Only time will tell. While we were on set making the film we talked about the possibilities and directions of how a sequel can go,” Reeves told Bloody Disgusting. “The fun of this movie was that it might not have been the only movie being made that night, there might be another movie! In today’s day and age of people filming their lives on their iphones and handy cams, uploading it to youtube…That was kind of exciting thinking about that.”
For those who waited out Friday to sponge on the wildly polarized reception from geeks and plain clothed civilians alike to J.J. Abrams’s monster bonanza, be sure to stick around until after the end credits because many people aren’t. Personally, I hope another Cloverfield doesn’t happen, but that opinion’s the equivalent of a scraped and jellied record these days. If it does move forward, I’ll already go ahead and give Reeves and Abrams the benefit of the doubt that it wouldn’t be e a retread, based solely on the quality of their first movie. And I don’t think it would go in the horizontal direction Reeves describes above.
Without spoiling anything, there seems to be a lot of curiosity left out there, and if the filmmakers can build a franchise that utilizes the original film’s innovative presentation and wild ideas while flipping expectations on their head, then I’ll support it. That’s a tall order for speculation fresh out the womb, I know. Maybe Abrams should just churn out a the sequel that features a sketchy 60-year-old white haired scientist in front of a slide projector who explains to the audience just what a monster is. “Ya see kids, a monster is part fish and part horse, but it’s not a sea horse!” That might satiate some of the moviegoers demanding their money back.