Man, I don't even know where to begin with Swiss Army Man. The film, colloquially known as "that movie where Daniel Radcliffe plays a farting corpse" is so incredibly bizarre that it's hard to pin down what co-writers and co-directors Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert intended to say with this film.
I can tell that there is a "message" hidden under the endless montages of Paul Dano, a man stranded on an island and prepared to hang himself, using the body of Daniel Radcliffe to find his way home (more details on this below), but I'll be damned if I can figure out exactly what it is. At times, the message seems almost pathetically childish (a corpse teaches a sad sack of a man how to live!) and other times it seems weirdly beautiful (there's some interesting play with the characters' gender and sexuality that is only briefly explored before being dropped like a lead balloon).
Swiss Army Man has some very good moments, but overall it's an unfocused mess. It's like a garbage dump: hey, you might find a vintage Playboy or a cool lampshade in there, but mostly you'll find rotten banana peels and old coffee grounds.
Let's see if I can tease out the knot of this movie further.
It starts with Hank (Dano), preparing to kill himself after being stranded on an island for months. But the sight of a body (Radcliffe) washed up on shore stops him. He rushes to the body, hoping the man is alive. Sadly, he is not. But before Hank goes back to his noose, he realizes that the flatulence emitted by the corpse is actually propelling the body into the ocean. Hank seizes on an idea--he gets on the body's back and rides the farting corpse to dry land. So, basically magical realism meets fart humor.
Hank discovers that Manny's body has many uses. His lungs fill with water after a rainstorm, letting Hank drink from Manny like a fountain. The discovery of an old Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition with titillating images leads Hank to discover that Manny's erection always points north (I am not even fucking kidding. How is this a movie? I actually am impressed with the sheer balls on this film). Thus, we have a title: like a Swiss Army knife, Hank uses Manny for survival purposes while also tutoring Manny in how to be a person again. Conversations about love, life, masturbation, and farting ensue. The message at this point seems to be 1) bodies and all of their functions are beautiful and natural and 2) we shouldn't hide things (like farts) or be ashamed of things (like masturbation) that make us happy.
I'm sorry, but no. I love movies that celebrate what it means to be human, but this movie is so sophomoric.
Despite the crude and unrefined message, Swiss Army Man has some lovely moments. When Manny sees a photo on Hank's phone of a beautiful woman, he becomes convinced that he knows this woman and she is meant to be his true love. He asks Hank to dress up as her and recreate how they might have met in order to spark Manny's memory (none of this makes sense, btw). The two men embark on elaborate sessions of dress up in order to teach Manny what it meant to be human and alive. Now, they could have just kept walking north until they found a road or something, but that's apparently not the point of the movie. So we have the above mentioned montages of Dano and Radcliffe engaging in world-building using the junk available in the woods. They use sticks and branches to create a bus and Hank dresses as the girl in the picture and encourages Manny to talk to "her" (Hank is obviously working through his own issues of shyness since, after all, the picture of the girl was on *his* phone and the woman in question is a girl *he* saw on the bus and was too scared to talk to). And this gender play leads to some interesting potential where you're like, are Hank and Manny gonna...hook up? Boy, I don't know how the fuck I feel about gay necrophilia, but at least it was interesting.
As you can probably tell, the purpose of all this is unclear and it's hard to tell where it's all going. And then the end of the film really just throws the whole thing to shit, in my opinion. Everything the movie seems to believe in ("don't be scared to be open with people", "be your authentic self", "you are loved more than you know") goes flying out the window during the final act of the movie which was, again, in my opinion, incredibly embarrassing and disheartening. All of the baggage the movie brings up--the girl in the photo and Hank and Manny's "love" for her, Hank's relationship with his father, Manny's worth and humanity, are all just flushed down the fucking toilet in the final scenes with no resolution. When the lights came up in the theatre, I was embarrassed for myself, the movie, and the audience. What had we just watched? What was the point? Was it a practical joke?
I titled this review "Manic Pixie Dream Corpse" because Swiss Army Man has a lot of similarities to movies where a whimsical woman (the trope of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl) teaches a sad sack man how to live. It also inhabits the same kind of universe as films like Little Miss Sunshine, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Garden State: films known for whimsy, magical realism, and simplistic morals and lessons. The problem is, it represents the worst of these types of movies. It could get away with being so bizarre if it were more subtle, or if it had a clearer focus. It wouldn't commit to being a straightforward comedy, a la Weekend at Bernie's or a straightforward fantasy film. But it wasn't a wonderful, intriguing mix of genres: it was a mess.
That said, the movie has to be seen to be believed, so I don't regret watching it per se. I just feel like the directors took the kernel of an interesting idea and completely blew it.
Grade: C-
No comments:
Post a Comment