Shown at the Sundance Institute at BAM, director Clark Gregg has perfectly captured the black humor and twisted scenarios in one of Chuck Palahniuk’s most evocative novels. By remaining both absolutely true to the plotlines and also adapting bits and pieces, such as the ending, this actor-turned-director has achieved a fluid narrative that touches the viewer without veering off into kitschy territory. Choke can potentially offend, hopefully disturb, emotionally affect, and outlandishly amuse, true to Palahniuk form, with scenes like an anal bead getting lost inside Victor’s body (don’t worry, it eventually comes out!).

Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell) is a “recovering” sex addict who never makes it through a whole meeting without sneaking off to get some action from one of the female addicts. By day, he works as a reenactor at a colonial park with his best friend Denny, who constantly gets in trouble for not sticking to historical limitations. By night, Victor and Denny (a chronic masturbator who takes the Steps more seriously than Victor) attend the sex meetings, go to strip clubs, and eat dinner in upscale restaurants so that Victor can choke. A flashback reveals that, in Victor’s childhood, he pretended to choke on a piece of food in order to receive affection from his fraudulent mother (Anjelica Huston), and also to alert the restaurant staff to his “missing child” face on the milk carton. In adulthood, Victor chokes to give other people a sense of having saved someone, or as having done something worthy, but he’s also in it for the free dinners and the cash his “saviors” provide in cards and letters after the ordeal.

Having dropped out of medical school to pay the bills for his ailing mother’s fancy psychiatric hospital, given that her Alzheimer’s disease (due, in part, to years of drug abuse) has worsened to the point where she refuses to eat, Victor routinely visits her, but only by posing as other people. Ida Mancini doesn’t recognize Victor, and he uses this to his advantage in order to glean from her the secrets of his tumultuous past, all the while getting it on with every available staff member. That is, until he meets Dr. Paige Marshall, who at first turns down his sexual advances, and then comes up with the scheme of having sex with him (in the hospital church!) so that he may impregnate her and use the embryonic stem cells for fixing Ida’s brain and thus saving her life. The only problem is that Victor can’t keep it up with Paige…certainly a first for him. Expressing his feelings for a woman is an entirely new experience for the guy who has only had detached, largely anonymous and purely physical sexual exploits throughout his mature life. His inability to bang Paige senseless puts his mind and sexual identity in a tailspin, while Denny, who is now collecting one rock for every day he doesn’t masturbate (and will eventually create a large structure with them), sees this as a positive change for his friend.

As if all of this didn’t have enough potential to be hysterical, Victor finds out, from having Paige translate his mother’s Italian diary, that he is supposedly a descendant of Jesus Christ himself after Ida was implanted with cells from the preserved foreskin of our Lord and Savior. Here’s where Choke becomes thematic, associating the quest for personal identity with spirituality, and exploring issues of truth and self-discovery. But however dramatic the film occasionally gets, it never loses its darkly humorous edge. One particularly hilarious scene, lifted straight from the pages, has Victor pretending to rape a woman who has very specific and neurotic sexual demands. Hint: the safe word is “poodle.”

Although some critics might not appreciate Gregg’s more literal interpretations of Palahniuk-style cynicism, or they might find the film shocking for shocking’s sake (certainly, sex and nudity are abundant), deeper issues of morality, friendship and romance, honesty, healing and self-exploration come to light in Gregg’s dramatic version of the tale. The film possesses the ability to please Palahniuk fans excited for the adaptation (though it’s quite a far cry from the likes of Fight Club) and also to entertain those who haven’t (yet) read the book.

by Amy Dupcak