"Swiss Army Man" Review

Swiss Army Man is a dark comedy-drama fantasy film directed and written by Daniel Scheinert and Dan Kwan, also known as "Daniels". It stars Paul Dano as Hank, a young man lost on what appears to be a deserted island and, in the moments before committing suicide, discovers the dead body of Daniel Radcliffe washing up on the shore. He names the body Manny and, after a series of farts, erections, and spontaneous bursts of water, finds out that Manny's semi-dead body (he's not autonomous of his movements but can speak and, as I said, get boners and toot) possesses fantastical powers, making him almost like a handy human multi-purpose tool, hence "Swiss Army Man". The two embark on an absolutely fucking bonkers journey through the wilderness to get back home to the love of Hank's life, and what began as a flatulence-infested brainfuck slowly reveals itself to actually be a bizarre, hilarious, and actually sort of touching examination of loneliness, mortality, obsession, and the human condition. No, really.

This film is one of my favorites of the year so far, not necessarily because it's flawless in its execution, but because it's so refreshingly weird and original. This is what the independent film circuit is for - strange, funny, thought provoking films that won't resonate with everybody, but are just crazy and inspired enough (and have just barely bankable enough stars) to find an audience. I'm that audience. As a fan of dark humor, unabashedly weird shit, and main characters who are in all likelihood severely deranged from whose perspective we witness the story, Swiss Army Man intrigued me ever since it triggered walk-outs and sneering dismissals from numerous critics at Sundance. Call me stupid, but I'm much more interested in a movie that drove people out in the first 10 minutes than a movie that got endless rave reviews. Still, it seems this movie is striking just the right chord that it needs to.

It's worth noting that I'm fairly familiar with Daniels' previous work, which is mostly in short films and YouTube videos. They sort of come from the Tim and Eric crowd, though I actually find much of their work to be more inspired, both in terms of concept and in filmmaking. The Daniels are very visual directors, and Swiss Army Man really shows their knack for framing, as their cinematographer Larkin Seiple gives us many gorgeous looking shots of the wilderness. They also seem to be very self-aware about cliches in filmmaking. Plenty of scenes in the film have all the ingredients of a heart-wrenching Hollywood moment - tearful overracting, building and soaring musical cues, and striking camerawork of beautiful landscapes - but the Daniels, being the self-aware gents they are, use these same elements to present things like a corpse propelling himself into the ocean toward the sunset Free Willy-style... with his farts.

That's what's great about this film - it's not enough to just be unabashedly strange and different, though I always admire it. And it's also one thing to be strange and different but have something resembling a point. Swiss Army Man does what every beautifully weird movie does and actually uses its weirdness as the construction of the point. It's not just smart and weird - it's smart in a weird way. A really weird way. While numerous moments in the film could easily be seen as a complete farce, and indeed they are absolutely hilarious in the most juvenile of ways, the film challenges you to take them seriously as the basis for its themes of feeling outcast and not understanding social norms that, when you actually strip it down after the big reveal in the third act (which is actually done rather subtly), is actually sort of heartbreaking.

And this all works and makes sense with what the movie sets out to do. The film operates like sort of a fucked up fairy tale for adults, in that it incorporates fantastical elements, and even the semi-romantic friendship of a troubled boy and a creature (in this case, an asocial cyber-stalker and a talking corpse with a boner), to make larger points about life - in this movie's case, that point being that to some degree, one's suppression of their own strange behaviors can often lead to them festering, getting worse, and ultimately becoming dangerous and actively detrimental to the person's health. And Radcliffe's Manny is sort of the childlike friendly creature the boy befriends who is largely unaware of the human world, learns innocently, and eventually is introduced to sadness, only to later corroborate the liberation of the main character. In this case, the film uses its fantastical elements and presents both them and the philosophical conclusion we get from them in the most ridiculous way possible. The film is all about how existence, life, and social interaction is senseless, messy, strange, confusing, and sometimes sad, so why shouldn't the journey to learning that reflect that?

Say what you will about this film being juvenile bullshit for angsty millennials, but the farts and boners and talk about sex and shitting is all toward a great truth - that we're all farting, fucking, shitting apes slowly dying looking for meaning and happiness and love before we become, the movie suggests, essentially trash. We fake somethingness before we go to nothingness. That the movie is committed to explore these themes in a unique way, wears its strangeness as a badge of honor, and elicits some arrestingly top-notch acting work from Paul Dano and especially Daniel Radcliffe is, I think, testament to its success.

Overall, once again, Swiss Army Man is hit or miss for people, so if you see my rating and the 65% Rotten Tomatoes rating and think this means critics thought it was fine and I thought it was brilliant, I don't think you understand how this film works. This is a love it or hate it film, and I just happened to love it. It does start losing its touch for a bit toward the end but luckily picks it right back up, and there are a few times where I wish it went further or committed more to its ideas rather than sometimes opting instead for a silly laugh. But, all things considered, it's clever, thoroughly entertaining, and wholly original, and one of the weirdest films I've ever seen. And those are descriptions few films can claim, which I think makes it worth a watch.

Grade: A-

(PS - God bless this film's distributor, A24, for taking the risk with this film and so many others. The company's only four years old and they are killing it. Some of their other films include Room, Green Room, Ex Machina, and The Lobster. As a movie fan, good on you, guys.)