Choke (**1/2)

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

The Savages (***1/2)

There’s no overabundance of movies about the relationships between adult brothers and sisters. The best one I know is You Can Count on Me, but this is a close second. Laura Linney is in both movies, and she’s joined here by the equally talented Philip Seymour Hoffman. A struggling would-be playwright (Linney) and an unhappy academic, they come together because their estranged father’s girlfriend has died, and he can’t care for himself. The bare outlines of the story may suggest a heartwarming tale of a family reunited, where an old man is able to atone for his inadequacy as a parent, where adult children learn to forgive, where a kind of closure is achieved. But it’s clear early on that the father is not capable of that sort of self-reflection at this late date, and the children aren’t expecting it. They’re merely fulfilling a duty, although the son, unlike the daughter, feels no need to splurge when choosing a nursing home for Dad.

Instead of an idealized family reunion we get flawed characters (she has a married lover, and he’s also having romantic difficulty) with fickle details, and a surprising amount of humor. (However, having seen the film billed as a comedy, I was surprised in the other direction. In the main, it’s definitely a drama.) The story is not happy, though the ending provides a touch of hopefulness. But neither is it maudlin. I’m sure some will disagree, but I never found the movie depressing, merely sad and somehow sweet. The writer-director Tamara Jenkins, whose previous feature was Slums of Beverly Hills, again shows a feel for the dynamics of families, even if the one here is quite different.

IMDB link

reviewed 4/25/08