Here it is. The film you've been waiting for. The film that's been dying to be made since the Lumière brothers projected the world's first moving pictures at the turn of the 20th century. The film that stars Daniel Radcliffe as a boner-sporting, incessantly farting corpse.
If, of course, the concept of a buddy comedy in which one of the buddies is a flatulent cadaver seems prohibitively strange or juvenile to you, turn back now. No excuses or apologies are made in the movie or in this review for Swiss Army Man's absurd central premise. The debut feature from writers/directors Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert — who use the collective alias DANIELS and have heretofore been known for their music videos, including Lil Jon's "Turn Down for What" and Tenacious D's "Rize of the Fenix" — could be and to some extent has been marketed as Castaway meets Weekend at Bernie's, plus farts. But that's reductive. As Kwan recently told Gawker, "We wanted to take something so lowbrow, and just smash it with something potentially beautiful and transcendent." For the most part, Kwan and Scheinert have succeeded in doing just that.
Paul Dano stars as Hank, a suicidal castaway saved from the brink of death by Manny, a washed-ashore corpse — that's Radcliffe, looking more like Elijah Wood and less like Harry Potter than ever before. This corpse possesses special powers, which reveal themselves slowly: Freshwater spews from Manny's mouth like a spigot, his arm chops wood as well as any hatchet, and his air biscuits are powerful enough to propel him — with Hank strapped aboard like Atreyu riding Falkor — across the ocean to the mainland. He's Hank's "multi-purpose-tool guy."
And here's the thing: Despite one of its two central characters being a corpse, Swiss Army Man somehow isn't all that macabre, save a few brief grisly glimpses toward the film's end. Swiss Army Man is childlike in its silliness and wonderment, peculiar but somehow wholesome. DANIELS are enchanted by the simple beauty of life's fleeting moments, and though it approaches cloying at times, the film balances well its sweetness and heart with its absurdism and existential dread.
As you might expect, life and death and the meaning and meaninglessness of both are central themes throughout. Bit by bit, Hank shows Manny — who develops speech and the abilities to move crudely, generate independent thought and ask naive questions — what it means to be a person, and in doing so illuminates the arbitrary nature of many of humanity's social mores. You're not supposed to fart or talk about masturbation around people, says Hank. Why not, Manny asks. Well, because you just aren't.
Since we as an audience check our disbelief at the door when we decide to see a movie in which a dead guy's erection acts as a compass (did I mention that part?), I suppose we shouldn't question the plausibility of Hank's elaborate props and sets and vignettes. Hank constructs these magical little scenes from garbage and detritus — the impermanence of stuff and people alike is another theme here — and uses them to explain love and society to Manny. Still, they're somehow slightly less believable than the whole talking-corpse thing. At their best, these moments echo the playful forest sequences of Terrence Malick's genius Badlands, and at their worst they have a sort of firefly-speckled near-Disney preciousness. But they're a vehicle for DANIELS' eye for unique shots and skill with effects, talents the duo honed while making music videos over the past half-decade. Similarly, a sequence in which Manny and Hank converse while lying prostrate, their faces upside-down to the viewer, is disorienting but striking.
Indeed, that's Swiss Army Man in a nutshell — disorienting, striking, wholly unique. There hasn't been a film quite like this one in recent memory, and its message is, as Benjamin Franklin once wrote, "fart proudly." (Seriously. Ben Franklin wrote an essay called "Fart Proudly." Look it up.) Fly your freak flag, DANIELS beseech, and pay attention to what is good and weird in life. That message could've been an overreach, sure, but Dano is relatable as the fragile loser, and Radcliffe displays real skill as a physical actor. Manchester Orchestra's score is the right degree of sentimental, and the questions raised — questions like Wouldn't you be a lot happier if you could truly be yourself at all times? — are valid ones.
And just like that, you've been tricked. The silly little movie with a cheese-cutting corpse made you feel something, and then made you feel silly for feeling something.
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