Partial translation

Choke (R18+) 3 stars Limited release THE task of bringing a well-regarded novel to the screen is always a perilous one, and even more so when the novelist is as distinctively unusual as Chuck Palahniuk.

Sam Rockwell in Choke

Choke (R18+) 3 stars Limited release THE task of bringing a well-regarded novel to the screen is always a perilous one, and even more so when the novelist is as distinctively unusual as Chuck Palahniuk.

 In 1999, David Fincher adapted Palahniuk's Fight Club into a powerfully nihilistic film that became a cult success, but Clark Gregg, who has adapted and directed the author's novel Choke for the screen, has trouble finding the right tone.

The central character in Choke is Victor Mancini, a challenging role that the talented Sam Rockwell almost succeeds in making believable. Victor, a dropout from medical school, earns the most basic wage working at a theme park depicting colonial America, alongside his buddy, Denny (Brad William Henke). The friends regularly attend AA-type meetings for sex addicts, Denny because he's a serial masturbator and Victor because he seemingly can't keep his hands off women, including another participant in the sex addicts' sessions (Paz de la Huerta).

We discover, through flashbacks mainly, that Victor is the way he is because of his mother, Ida (Anjelica Huston), a non-conformist of the most extreme kind, who is now suffering from dementia (she doesn't know her son) and is ensconced in a home for the elderly.

Victor pays for his mother's care by means of an extremely unconvincing scam that gives the film (and the book) its title: he pretends to be choking to death in some public place in the hope that someone will come to his aid and give him money into the bargain.

While this very far-fetched notion might have worked on the printed page, on the screen it doesn't convince at all, and it's far from amusing. More successful is the relationship between Victor and Paige Marshall (Kelly Macdonald), a doctor whose wholesome demeanour causes his usually reliable sexual prowess to fail him. Macdonald is good in this role, and Rockwell manages to make the rather unpleasant Victor a surprisingly sympathetic character.

There are plenty of interesting and unusual elements in this very strange film, but in the end it seems that whatever special spirit was present in Palahniuk's book has eluded Gregg and his collaborators. Choke emerges as awkward and wrong-footed, and yet the elements are in place for what might have been a very original portrait of some extremely troubled characters.