An adaptation of the Chuck Palahniuk (“Fight Club”) novel “Choke” is a black comedy that follows Victor Mancini (Sam Rockwell), a sex addict who works as a Colonial War re-enactor and runs a con scheme that involves deliberately choking in restaurants and attaching himself parasitically to his rescuers, all to fund his mother’s (Anjelika Huston) care at a private mental hospital. He is forced to address his intimacy issues when he falls in love with his mother’s doctor and discovers that he is unable to perform with the one woman he actually likes.
Actor-turned-director Clark Gregg shows he is as adept behind the camera as he is in front of it with CHOKE, a wickedly colorful dark comedy about mothers and sons, sexual compulsion, and the sordid underbelly of Colonial theme parks. Victor Mancini (Rockwell), a sex-addicted med-school dropout, who keeps his increasingly deranged mother, Ida (Huston), in an expensive private medical hospital by working days as a historical reenactor at a Colonial Williamsburg theme park.
At night Victor runs a scam by deliberately choking in upscale restaurants to form parasitic relationships with the wealthy patrons who “save” him. When, in a rare lucid movement, Ida reveals that she has withheld the shocking truth of his father’s identity, Victor enlists the aid of his best friend, Denny (Henke) and his mother’s beautiful attending physician, Dr. Paige Marshall (Macdonald), to solve the mystery before the truth of his possibly divine parentage is lost forever.
Starring: Sam Rockwell, Anjelica Huston, Kelly Macdonald, Brad William Henke
Directed by: Clark Gregg
Screenplay by: Clark Gregg
Release: September 26, 2008
MPAA Rating: R for strong sexual content, nudity and language.
Box Office: $2,926,565 (US total)
Studio: Fox Searchlight Pictures
