“Forced” is the word that best summarizes Clark Gregg’s adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk’s Choke. The story of both the novel and the movie follows a sex addict and con man named Victor (Sam Rockwell). Victor may or may not be cloned from the holy foreskin of Jesus, and he perpetrates a series of minor crimes in order to keep his demented mother in a private care facility. The novel meanders about Victor’s life, gradually building to an irreverent climax, as do most of Palahniuk’s stories. Fight Club, the other major film adaptation of a Palahniuk novel, understood that meandering stories lose their audience’s attention very quickly when told in a visual medium, and so director David Fincher made several clever adjustments that gave the impression of constant forward movement without losing the novel’s wryly casual tone. The failure to adapt the source material is Choke’s main problem, but is by no means its last.
Like so many actor-cum-directors, Gregg’s relative inexperience behind the camera shows itself through a workmanlike visual style that gets too close to incompetence in too many places to be taken seriously. Every scene is mired in technical issues that only contribute to the overall feeling of the story’s incongruence with the medium. The novel’s many flashbacks to Victor’s odd childhood are marked by an awkward fade-to-white that isn’t quite as obnoxious or cheesy as, say, a star wipe, but the two probably share an editing program drop-down menu labelled “not cool since 1985.” Gregg’s photography, while quite effective in some places (specifically the many sex scene cutaways whenever Victor sees a woman he’s slept with), often reeks of a faux-Guy Ritchie pretense that recalls — ugh — a McG action-blockbuster abortion like Charlie’s Angels.
Nuts-and-bolts technical issues aside, Choke is not entirely awful. Most of the laughs from the novel are maintained, although they are stripped of most of their dark irony by Rockwell’s unusually mugging delivery — even when Rockwell is overdoing it, he has more than enough charisma to prop up a languorous scene. Kelly Macdonald, on the other hand, delivers her lines like a Speak & Spell, and Anjelica Huston roars around the screen with an almost vaudevillian bombast (especially during the flashbacks) that’s hilariously inappropriate, given that she’s supposed to be the redemptive emotional anchor for the otherwise depraved Victor.
Despite Choke’s many flaws, it’s just bad in an average way, not an awful way. The technical problems are distracting and its misuse of so much excellent talent is a shame, but fans of the novel may delight in seeing a new interpretation of Palahniuk’s novel. They just better be really, really big fans.
