The
feature length debut of two guys who make music videos for a living,
'Swiss Army Man' mixes fart jokes and gross-out humour with a
surprising level of depth and character development on the wonderful wet west coast.
The
music video origins of the directorial pair show stylistically
through the abundance of montages (that are beautifully
choreographed, and segue scenes seamlessly into one another). Music
pervades the entire movie, but it's all originally diegetic. The main
character makes his own awkward humming mumble, and then it grows
non-digetically, building with his spirit and crashing with his
failure. The result makes an echo chamber of the entire film, filling
it with his mind and helping us to be sucked into his world.
Plot-wise
it's a fairly simple film. We open with Hank seemingly alone on a
desert island, trying to kill himself. He's interrupted by the
arrival of Manny, a corpse who washes up on the beach. The rest of
the movie follows the pair's adventures. There isn't a whole lot of
unnecessary dialogue, and much of it does a lot of heavy lifting.
There are lots of double meanings and set-ups to pay-offs. An
example: the very first shots as the film starts are of Hank's
creations with an overlay of music. Both of these components are huge
parts of the film, and are running themes throughout. Another
example: early on Hank says how he thought his life would flash
before his eyes right before he dies. This is referenced to several
times later on, and is a good set up to the connection he has to
Radcliffe later on.
'Swiss
Army Man' is funny in an extremely unconventional way. Apparently
there were lots of people walking out of first screenings - fools.
Paul Dano does well as Hank and Daniel Radcliffe is amazing as Manny
the corpse. What range he has, I love the guy.
It's
a very personal movie about hope and loss, and is an excellent
introspection of Hank's character as the philosophical self-examining
aspect of himself is thrown out into a corpse. During the film Manny starts looking and acting more and more alive, until we finally see him from the point of view of outsiders at the end, and see how sodden, pale, and clearly dead he is. My favourite shot of the whole film was Manny's metemorphosis into a skeleton; a quick simple take in a timelapse style, not intended to scare but simply to show Hank and us all that we really are. I like this film for many of the same reasons I love 'Hamlet'.
The one thing I would
have changed was the way that Manny farted off into the sunset at the
end. In proving Hank right it was a little too light-hearted for me.
I'd have left it at the little girl seeing him talk earlier on, then
had the chase at the end, but to end in nothing more than him begging
a dead body to come to life. Much like the end of 'Nightmare at
20,000 Feet' this would have been so perfectly bitter, with just an
ounce of hope, as they could have maybe thrown in a shot of the kid
insisting that Manny was alive all along, or something.
Because
whether or not the rest of the world believes him doesn't matter. It
doesn't matter if they think he's mad, because it doesn't change what
he's experienced and learnt. It doesn't make him wrong, or the events
of the film to be any less real for him.
Swiss Army Man: 89.6