It’s a hard-and-fast rule in every sense of the term: Sex sells. But in Choke – an adaptation based on Chuck Palahniuk’s novel of the same name – there’s something incredibly depressing about the fornication at hand.
As self-professed sex addict Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell, Snow Angels) reaches orgasm with a fellow nymphomaniac on the bathroom floor, he describes the sexual escalation as “perfect, beautiful nothing.” The narration seems almost unnecessary, given the apparent emotional void.
There’s nothing too glossy about Mancini’s lavatory relations. Tim Orr’s cinematography brings the audience into the gritty reality of Mancini’s habits. Despite the setting – just around the corner from an AA-style sex addicts’ meeting – the scene isn’t played entirely for laughs.
Then again, Choke’s comedic high-point comes during some botched, fake-rape titillation; its sweetest sexual moments take place in a chapel.
“You know you’re talking about Choke when you’re talking about the chapel sex scenes,” said Clark Gregg, the first-time director and writer behind the film, in an interview with The Diamondback.
Achieving such a delicate tonal tight-rope walk was no easy feat for Gregg. His earliest script drafts (some dating back nearly seven years) hedged too close to one extreme or the other.
“I felt like there needed to be a balance,” Gregg said of the writing process. “It wasn’t super conscious. It wasn’t like I was going, ‘Oh, there’s two dark scenes. We need something funny about now.’ I would kind of finish a version of it, and I would kind of go, ‘Yeah, it still feels like it’s too heavy,’ or, ‘That’s too silly.’
“I felt like the funny parts wouldn’t be as funny unless they were coming from a dark place,” he added.
Though Gregg admitted his first attempts at adapting the book were “safe” and “faithful,” the final product boasts the sort of free-wheeling absurdity and ballsy material we just don’t see enough on the big screen. Rockwell, whom Gregg described as “a rare creature,” feels right at home fleshing out Mancini’s messy life.
A medical school dropout supporting his mother’s (Anjelica Huston, Martian Child) prolonged stay in a mental ward, Mancini moves through many shades of lovable, despicable and, frequently, pitiful. His signature restaurant scam involves pretending to choke, so he may fall into the arms of the quickest, bravest patron to answer his pleas.
Needless to say, the man has some affection issues. We get a little too much backstory via flashbacks detailing Mancini’s childhood on the run with his mom, a small-time vandal, big-time headcase. Rather than falling back on his past as an excuse for the present, Mancini almost revels in his miserable self-image. At least until he falls for Paige Marshall (Kelly Macdonald, The Merry Gentleman), his mother’s physician, and strives to be a better person … for a little while, anyway.
The real joy of the film comes from Choke’s little eccentricities. Along with his best friend and fellow addict (chronic masturbator), Denny (Brad William Henke, Altered), Mancini works at a Colonial Williamsburg-style authentic village as a lowly serf.
The location was one of many problems for a production that had folded on several occasions. All within striking distance of Essex County, N.J., Gregg and company found “a gigantic abandoned mental hospital and a tiny, crappy zoo, and, the next county over, run by their pals, a colonial village that was changing management and was deserted.”
“We didn’t even have to have trailers,” Gregg said. “All the actors had, like, little padded cells that were their dressing rooms.”
Not too glamorous, but Gregg feels the shoestring budget and blistering 25-day shoot gave the film a “raw and guerilla” aesthetic true in spirit to Palahniuk’s book.
“I’m a little wary because the Chuck Palahniuk fans are going to compare it to Fight Club, which is in a very different style [and is] a very different book, in my opinion,” Gregg said. “And [the production had] $60-million some more than we had. But I think if they get what’s great about Chuck’s voice, they’re [going] to recognize that these two things are like cousins. They’re the rich cousin, and we’re the poor cousin.”
Much like Fight Club, Choke starts to wear a little thin down the stretch, but blow-for-blow (pun very much intended), it’s a far more amusing, less pompous treat – oddly endearing in its sordid charm.
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RATING: 3 1/2 out of 5 stars
