Choke

The elusive Bison Whisperer stayed with me for a few days last week and this past weekend. Yes, he's real! He may not actually post on this site, but we did talk a lot about music and movies, as we tend to do when we're together. Saturday night we decided to see a movie at the little theater down the street from me, though pickings were a little slim. We decided on Choke, the movie based on the Chuck Palahniuk novel by the same name.

Now I love me some Chuck Palahniuk. His books are sick and twisted, but often fairly amusing, too. Choke is the story of a sex-addicted historical re-enactor who deliberately chokes on food in restaurants so people will save him and feel good about themselves (and later, send him money because they feel responsible for him). It's a good read. The problem is, though Palahniuk's books are generally quite entertaining, they've got to be a bear to adapt to film. They generally don't have much of a plot, they often jump around in time or have some complicated narrative device, and I can't recall any of them ending happily. A crazy good director, like, say, David Fincher, can still pull it off. First time director Clark Gregg...not so much.

That isn't to say this was a bad movie. Some individual scenes were pretty good, I laughed out loud a few times, and the acting (particularly by the star, Sam Rockwell, and the always entertaining Angelica Houston) ranged from good to excellent. But the heart of the book--the choking scam the central character practices to "earn" money for his ailing mother--is essentially side-lined in the film while the sex addiction comes to the forefront. The result is a movie that appears to be a bit slapdash. True, the book is pretty slapdash, too, but books can get away with that whereas movies generally can't. By the time we got to the "twist" ending (which I'd honestly completely forgotten since reading the book), instead of shock, there was more of a little shoulder shrug on my part. The ending was also completely different from the book, which ended on a huge downer. I was suprised this purported Sundance winner played it safe with even a marginally happy ending.

It's impossible to say how I would have liked this movie if I hadn't read the book. Bison Whisperer, who hadn't read the book, seemed to like it OK. I'd rent it at some point if you're a Palahniuk fan, just because adaptations of his books are few and far between. If you happen to like Sam Rockwell, who's a fairly underrated actor, you might enjoy him here in one of his few leading roles. If you want to choose between the movie and the book, however, go for the novel.