Movie Review: Choke

“Choke” is the sunny, funny version of a Chuck Palahniuk movie.

The insurgent novelist’s only other book that’s been brought to the screen is “Fight Club,” though.

But really, this dirty-minded wallow in conning, fornicating and trashing our Early American heritage has been directed with a cackling light touch by stage and TV actor Clark Gregg (he’s the ex on “The New Adventures of Old Christine”). The atmosphere is totally scuzzy, but the character work is deft, the storytelling complex, and there’s even some nicely modulated redemption sneaked in amid the delusion and dysfunction and unsanitariness of it all.

And why shouldn’t there be? It’s also about finding your own personal Jesus in your own blasphemous way. But mainly, “Choke” is about finding oneself. In typical Palahniuk fashion, layers of false personalities must be worked through to get there.

Our protagonist (can’t call him a hero) is Sam Rockwell’s Victor Mancini. His job is portraying an Irish indentured servant at a Williamsburg-like colonial village where the staff is expected to talk and act like they did back in olden times. Being an insatiable sex addict who views his therapy group as a great place to pick up chicks, Victor isn’t exactly committed to portraying our pious forebears accurately.

He is, however, devoted to his Alzheimer’s-stricken mother, Ida (Anjelica Huston). At least to the extent that he’ll go to great lengths — pretending to choke in restaurants is one of them — to swindle the fee for her care facility out of gullible strangers.

She was some kind of anarchist who was in and out of Victor’s life when he was a child (Jonah Bobo plays him in the haunting flashbacks), and he’s obsessed with discovering who his father was now that Ida’s on her way out.

Sympathetic Dr. Paige (”No Country for Old Men’s” Kelly Macdonald) knows of a procedure, still in the experimental stage, of course, that may bring Ida’s memory back. But it involves harvesting some of Victor’s stem cells and, unusually enough, he can’t do his part in that process with her. Could it be he’s actually found true love for the first time in his life?

We won’t even get into what goes on with Victor’s co-workers and the other inmates at Ida’s hospital. We’ll just say that this film knows no boundaries of propriety, including a rape fantasy played as pure sex farce. That should tell anybody if this is their kind of movie or not.

In “Choke,” the always underappreciated Rockwell gives a performance as rich and varied as his Chuck Barris was in “Confessions of a Dangerous Mind.” He always makes Victor seem smarter than anyone else in the room, but so deep-down screwed up that he’s usually the most pathetic person there, too. But Rockwell also locates nobility in Victor’s quest for the truth, self-centered and alienating as it often is.

A completely bizarre sex farce that’s heartfelt and stomach-turning in about equal measure, “Choke” also delivers a terrific climactic twist and the best dumb-blonde joke in years.

Genre: Comedy, Drama, Adaptation

MPAA Rating: R

Trailer

Movie Website: chokeonthis.net

Actors/Actresses: Sam Rockwell, Anjelica Huston, Kelly McDonald, Brad Henke, Joel Grey

Our Verdict:

It’s not for delicate tastes, but man, is it imaginative.