Choke--A Review

Victor Mancini has had sex with every nurse in his mother's nursing home. He is desperate and traumatized, an unshaved man-child, trying to sift out the truth in his mother's demented meanderings--a paradigm of author Chuck Palahniuk's personas.

Adapted to the screen by newbie director, Clark Gregg (The Usual Suspects),  Choke stays true to the dirty fingernails style of Palahniuk's prose. Gregg is not afraid to explore protagonist Victor Mancini's (Sam Rockwell) past, a childhood peppered with appearances of a wayward, beautiful mother Ida (Anjelica Huston) who coerces him to abandon every loving foster family Victor ever knew. Now, as an adult, he visits the aging Ida under different guises, faithfully nourishing her with chicken parmigiana when, in a moment of lucidity, she reveals information that sends Victors on a mission to find out the truth of his origins.

Rockwell as Victor is cast well enough. He is sleazy and wears unclean like a smart looking tux. His crooked face coveys genuine confusion by what happens to him as the truth becomes more mental than he is. Gregg makes good directorial choices, always maintaining the audience's attention by eliminating dead air, though this may have been detrimental to the development of the self-hating Victor, a character that isn't easily swallowed by the audience. This appeal to our superficial fascination with sex acts, the gross, mysterious, and crazy, may have been too much for Victor's heart to survive in the minds of viewers. In truth, we feel the same for him at the end of the movie as at the beginning: lukewarm.

But take all of the sick curiosities out of a Palahniuk screenplay and you haven't got much to work with. A consistently entertaining film that doesn't require emotional investment. Just like Victor's sex addiction: it's all action with no strings attached.