Review

Review Date: 5-October-08
Spoiler Rating: Medium
Juju Judgment: Junk

Choke (2008)

One adjective comes to mind when I consider why it is hard to swallow Choke: informal. Most comedies have an informal quality which allows us to laugh at the characters without feeling like boors or bad people. But Choke tries to elicit concern as well as laughter, concern for a sex-addicted swindler who takes money from people who perform the Heimlich maneuver on him after he surreptitiously forces himself to choke. This guy, Victor (Sam Rockwell), traces his present deficiencies to a childhood split between foster homes and road trips with his crazy, overpowering mother (Anjelica Huston), who is now succumbing to dementia in a nursing home. If there was ever a life that needed finesse for a comic telling, Victor's is it. Yet the movie's informality is closely related to sloppiness, making it difficult to care for Victor as he shuffles down the road to redemption.

Rockwell has played tender losers before, and he generates sympathy as far as the movie allows. Victor and his best friend Denny (Brad William Henke) are wastrels whose only gratification comes from orgasms achieved without the emotional involvement of another person (or even the physical involvement in Denny's case). To bolster their quirkiness factor, which might be funnier in Chuck Palahniuk's source novel, they work as historical re-enactors at a colonial village. During visits to his mother's bedside, Victor is accosted by other demented old ladies with demons needing exorcism, and he develops an actual, normal crush on a not actually normal doctor. Irish actor Kelly Macdonald is a boon to any movie she is in, but however much she succeeds in representing the cure for Victor's ills as the doctor, she cannot sell a weird tangent concerning his possible conception from the preserved foreskin of Jesus Christ.

The times when one feels most for Victor are during flashbacks of his youth (when he is played by Jonah Bobo), since it is one thing to despise or mock an adult screw-up but quite another to see him as a child getting screwy signals about the nature of love. All right, Victor has reasons for fearing interpersonal bonds that involve parts of him other than his penis. That this is true, and that he must struggle through his mother's death for a shot at leaving the past behind, are subjects that deserve respect even from a comedy. Choke is as messy as its hero's life, courting awkward laughs at eccentricity which is too closely wedded to pain.

Copyright © 2008 The Jujube (M. I. Kim). All rights reserved.