MEETING THE ODD
Philosophical survival story is a deeply weird, deeply funny film
The will-to-live movie is one that can adapt to almost any setting and transcend genres. The Great Escape, Alien, 127 Hours, the recent shark-attack movie The Shallows — all feature humans trying to endure against the odds.
Swiss Army Man is the latest to tackle this existential quandary, but it’s also like nothing you’ve seen before. The elevator pitch might be “Weekend at Bernie’s II meets Cast Away,” but even that doesn’t capture the fine gradations of acting (play dead!) and the wondrous, mostly a cappella score.
Let’s meet the protagonists. Hank (Paul Dano) is stranded on a tiny patch of land in the Pacific, sunburnt and starving and about to hang himself. Manny (Daniel Radcliffe) is already dead. Not American Beauty dead or I’ve-got-a-sixth-sense-about-this-guy dead. He’s as expired as my high school library card.
Hank doesn’t realize this at first, but death is the kind of social impediment it’s hard to hide. Still, Manny manages to communicate, after a fashion, by expelling gas from his body cavity. (It’s the deceased’s way of saying “hello!”) Hank responds by riding him to the mainland like a flatulent Jet Ski.
This might be a good time to point out that Swiss Army Man is a deeply weird movie, combining the humour of an eight-year-old with the wisdom of the ages. Imagine someone explaining Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, but snickering every time they said his last name. “What is life?” asks Manny, who gets livelier as the film progresses. And, not much later: “What is Netflix?”
Hank responds as best he’s able, occasionally hitting on truths that have evaded previous generations of philosophers: “Before the Internet, every girl was a little more special.”
But these two new death-long friends have merely traded one wilderness for another. They’re on the mainland, but still lost and unable to get a cell signal. Worse, their abandonment is as much metaphysical as physical. Hank is pining for a girl he once saw on a bus, while Manny considers whether there are things worth coming back to life for.
Cribbing from Gilligan’s Island, they create a bamboo replica of the vehicle and role-play. Did I say deeply weird? I forgot to add deeply funny.
Of course, for most people the question of what to do when you’re dead remains hypothetical, but the genius of co-writers and directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert is that they don’t let fatality get in the way of a good plot twist. “You’re a miracle or I’m just hallucinating from starvation,” Hank says at one point, as Manny reveals that his army-knife’s worth of options includes issuing water from his mouth like a fountain gargoyle.
Word out of the Sundance festival, where Swiss Army Man premiered, was that it was divisive and created walkouts. But unless you’ve got a problem with farts, or with a certain body part (summon your inner-eightyear-old here) being used as a compass/divining rod, there’s no reason to leave.
These two actors are among the most interesting of their generation, and the screenplay puts the “gee!” in eulogy. By the end of the film, you may have a hard time deciding whether it’s Manny or Hank who is experiencing an emotional resuscitation. But you’d have to be dead inside not to feel an answering stir.