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Dir. Clark Gregg
Rating: 5.5 | 0 User Reviews | Send to Friend
The cadre of marauding Chuck Palahniuk fans might bellow otherwise, but at his worst, the man can fall prey to a kind of cloying, false iconoclasm -- shooting at sacred cows with little more than spitballs from a paper straw. Director Clark Gregg's adaptation of Palahniuk's novel about a down-and-out sex addict named Victor (Sam Rockwell), who intentionally clogs food in his throat at restaurants so he can be "saved" by good Samaritans, and thus financially rewarded by them, in order to pay for his deranged mother, Ida (Anjelica Huston), to continue her expensive mental hospital stay, gets bogged down by Palahniuk's strained satire. It's not that the cast isn't doing their part -- both Rockwell and Huston are excellent, and Brad William Henke does a nice Seth Rogen-like turn as Victor's best friend -- it's that the story, which manages to drag period reenactments, 'savior syndrome' and Jesus' holy foreskin into its maw, relies far too much on sacrilege and shock value to do its work for it. There is a concentrated, intentional lo-fi vibe to the whole enterprise, shot on digital video, with actors looking less than smooth and dingy lighting suffusing the screen. In repeated flashbacks to Victor's childhood, Huston is shown in a ridiculous-looking dark wig, otherwise looking every bit of her age. Gregg wants us to live inside Palahniuk's bleak vision, become immersed and arrested by it, but far too many times the film edges towards glib -- a series of punch lines to dirty jokes told by the wanna-be self-debased.
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