"Choke" is a charming little movie, but appreciating it requires an enthusiastic appetite for sleaze. Here is a film made in the spirit of cheerful depravity, a comedy that manages to cram an endless parade of debauched behavior into a mere 90 minutes of screen time. Sitting through it is like listening to a dirty joke that goes on forever; there's no punch line to speak of, just an endless tirade of filth.
How could a movie of such astonishing obscenity be worth watching, you ask? We'll get to that in a minute. First, the plot: "Choke" concerns the exploits of Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell), a seedy lowlife who compensates for his general dissatisfaction with the world by cultivating a recreational addiction to sex.
We first meet Victor at a Sex Addicts Anonymous meeting, from which he quickly excuses himself in order to fornicate with a fellow attendee. Also at the meeting is Denny (Brad William Henke), a compulsive masturbator who spends about a third of the film with his hands down his pants.
Victor and Denny work as "historical interpreters" at a colonial theme park, where they spend most of their time trying to coax sexual favors from the local milkmaids. To supplement his income as an 18th-century peasant, Victor moonlights as a part-time con man; he spends his evenings simulating choking fits in upscale restaurants, where wealthy patrons compete to perform the Heimlich maneuver on him.
So grateful are these strangers for their moment of impromptu heroism that they gladly acquiesce to Victor's subsequent solicitations for cash. "I provide a service to these people," Victor explains, as though preying upon the charity of bystanders were a philanthropic act.
Victor's sole redeeming quality is his affection for his mother Ida (Anjelica Huston), a senile ex-fugitive whose stay in an expensive nursing home is bankrolled by her son's esophageal misadventures. Ida is aided by a pretty young doctor named Paige Marshall (Kelly Macdonald), whose unstained beauty attracts Victor like a moth to a bonfire.
Dr. Marshall eventually decides to sleep with Victor, on the pretense of harvesting his stem cells for scientific experimentation. After that, things start to get a little weird.
If the plot sounds like a laundry list of narrative eccentricity, that's because it is.
Long passages of "Choke" feel less like coherent events than dispatches from the edge of sanity. There's a gag about a misplaced anal bead, a comic rape sequence, an extended subplot involving Jesus Christ's misplaced foreskin -- you get the idea. It all adds up to an antic circus of the absurd, not overwhelmingly funny but compulsively watchable.
Credit is due to Chuck Palahniuk, the cult author whose twisted mind gave birth to the source material upon which "Choke" is based. Palahniuk's original novel was a comedy so black that it hardly warranted the term, a wail of existential angst cast into the mold of a comic satire. The transition to screen has lightened things up a bit, softening the pitch-dark tone of the text into a decidedly more amiable concoction; note the abridged ending, hardly cathartic but vastly more heartwarming than the original.
Palahniuk's preoccupation with carnality remains quite intact, however. The creators of "Choke" seem to agree with their protagonist's attitude that sex is inherently sordid, emotionally vacant and endlessly amusing. This outlook is not dissimilar to that of the average 16-year-old, and it is with depressing frequency that the film descends to that level of puerility.
A running joke about an old woman's molestation fantasy dies on the vine, and Victor's tendency to visualize the naked breasts of every passing female seems like a sophomoric ploy to inflate the film's nudity quota.
And yet, "Choke" is redeemed by its most unexpected characteristic: a sentimental side. Beneath the film's copious layers of affected smuttiness lies a guileless sympathy for its hapless characters, an openhanded affection that tows the line of cheesiness but never quite crosses it. There's even a hint of moral acuity in the third act, as Victor gradually starts to wake up to his own degeneracy.
I have often bridled against the tendency of contemporary American comedies to apologize for their own raunchiness (observe the collected works of Judd Apatow for Exhibits A through Z), but here the effort feels refreshingly unforced.
This is largely thanks to Sam Rockwell, that invaluable actor who doesn't seem to have a saccharine bone in his body. Rockwell's performance neither excuses nor condones Victor's behavior; rather, with his hollow laugh and plaintive eyes, he conjures up a portrait of a lost soul whose nihilistic affectations are matched only by the insecurities they mask.
Rockwell spends most of the movie looking absolutely terrible, a greasy, unshaven mass of tics and blemishes. I'm not quite sure how such a decrepit sod could have acquired Victor's impressive resum of sexual conquests, but I suppose it takes all kinds.
"Choke" marks the directorial debut of Clark Gregg, an obscure character actor who has spent the past couple of decades toiling anonymously in the corners of Hollywood. Gregg casts himself in a bit part as the Lord High Charlie, an obstinate killjoy who rules the colonial theme park with self-righteous flair. It's a small role but an interesting one -- straight-laced and sexless, Charlie is the only character who stands apart from the centrifuge of depravity that keeps the rest of the movie spinning.
Peering into this warped world from the outside, Charlie shares our perspective; the universe that these characters inhabit may be strange and sordid, but the characters themselves make it well worth the trip.
