This psychological comedy-drama is based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk, who’s best known for his first novel, Fight Club. Palahniuk has written several books, but the two that got made into movies are about men in their extreme. The protoganist here is Victor (Sam Rockwell), who’s stuck on step four of his twelve-step plan to defeat sex addiction, stuck in a job he doesn’t care for (costumed in a reconstituted colonial village), and stuck with a mother (Angelica Huston) too self-absorbed to raise a child, now too dementia-addled to recognize him. His best friend is another sex addict, a compulsive masturbator.
The film completely avoids sentimentality by allowing Victor to seem like a jerk at times and by injecting a fair amount of often-vulgar (but sometimes-dry) humor. To be sure, the laughs frequently come from mocking some of the minor characters. There are the more-perverted sex addicts (versus Victor’s garden-variety promiscuity), the silly old folks in Mom’s nursing home, and even a sex partner of Victor who interrupts her rape fantasy to berate his acting skills. Dramatically, Huston shines in the flashback scenes of a younger Victor, and Kelly Macdonald brings a warmth to her role as the nursing-home doctor who challenges Victor’s fear of intimacy.
Though the movie isn’t that much like Fight Club, I had the same feeling about it, which is that, despite being consistently watchable, there was kind of a put-on quality about it. The way the nursing-home patients unnaturally gravitate toward Victor is one example. Some of what I initially found implausible, like the doctor’s affection for Victor, gets explained later. (A few small twists substitute for the one major one in Fight Club.) And there’s enough originality that I can easily see Choke gaining favor with many, although probably not the cult following that Fight Club attracted. But for me it was kind of funny but not that memorable.
IMDB link
viewed 9/22/08 (screening at Ritz 5); reviewed 9/25/08
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