Swiss Army Man
(2016)
(SPOILERS) Sometimes I’ll finish watching a movie entirely
bewildered by the praise it somehow merited. Spring Breakers was one notable case. Swiss Army Man is another. I’ll readily admit that music video
turned feature directors Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan are incredibly
inventive and talented – as writers not so much – and that Daniel Radcliffe’s
performance as a corpse shows range I never knew he had (I mean that both ironically
and seriously). Otherwise, the experience
felt like being harangued by a blowhard hipster for 90 minutes, one who thinks he
has something desperately, insightfully deep to say but is actually running on
empty after five. It isn’t even all that appealing if you love fart jokes: any
given Austin Powers is far more
flatulently fulfilling.
I was tempted to label Swiss
Army Man a one-joke movie, so impressed with its own single-plane weirdness
that it irons itself out into something not really very weird or compelling at
all. Which would be unfair to its serious undertones. Yet those serious
undertones in no way retrospectively justify the banality of having to endure
Paul Dano (as Hank Thompson), never the most endearing of performers (some
would say punchable, but let’s not be too hasty), effectively talking to
himself for – yes, I’ll mention how long this lasts again – 90 minutes. And
mostly about farting and masturbation. Swiss
Army Man’s a movie consumed with bodily functions and the eccentric
(imagined) ability of Radcliffe’s cadaver (“Manny”) to come to Hank’s rescue at
the unlikeliest moments, until it’s not.
Then – much, much too late – it becomes a movie refocussing
on the suicidal circumstances in which we first met Hank, mentally ill and
obsessed with a young mother in his neighbourhood (Mary Elizabeth Winstead).
She is understandably aghast when he shows up in her backyard and his secret is
revealed (this sequence also involves an erection gag in front of her daughter,
always a great source of hilarity). Winstead’s performance is so tonally
sensitive and insightful to Hank’s warped reality, I was very nearly willing to
flip into seeing the picture in a retrospectively more rewarding light. Instead,
we quickly revert to an “objective” scene in which Manny speeds off on a new fart-powered
journey (as Winstead observes, “What the
fuck?”)
There were clues from the beginning – besides the talking
corpse, and a genuinely funny moment where Hank discovers to his amazement that
he can use Manny as a flatulence-powered speedboat – that something was amiss,
in that somehow, he has apparently been marooned on a desert island but his
mobile phone battery hasn’t run out (even turning it off, it would eventually
drain of power). But to engage with the reveal is to credit the preceding
material, which plays like a fourteen-year-old’s idea of existential angst.
There’s no profundity to Hank’s ruminations on life, sex, love and death, interspersed
with moments of squirrel murder via Manny’s bazooka mouth or scaring off a
rampaging bear by setting himself alight.
The directors have gone to great lengths and abundantly
creative effort to bring to life Hank’s fantasy world, composed of litter and
forest debris, but the substance is consistently tiresome. No, I didn’t find Hank’s
self-delusional, make-believe relationship with Manny affecting, moving,
insightful or joyous. I found it irksome and tedious. I’ve seen reviews comparing
the directors’ style to Michel Gondry’s, which is actually a good call; working
with others’ scripts, Gondry’s work has been sometimes extraordinary. Playing
in his own self-penned sandbox, he has been consistently insufferable.
So Dano is Dano, but Radcliffe’s a different matter. For the
first time that I can recall – certainly in terms of his transition as an adult
actor – I wasn’t conscious of Radcliffe doing his over-delivered, over-eager
Radcliffe thing. Perhaps it’s the voice, perhaps it’s just good direction, but he’s
a world away from Now You See Me 2
here, suggesting there may be hope for the ex-Potter yet.
I’d sooner rewatch Weekend
at Bernie’s any day than Swiss Army
Man again. At least that picture had no pretensions to depth (on the other
hand, Mr Profound himself, Shane Carruth, must have seen something in it, since
he cameos as a coroner). The score by Andy Hull and Robert McDowell is
magnificently uplifting, and Larkin Seiple’s cinematography is similarly
vibrant and inventive, but to no avail. If you’re feeling particularly
masochistic, you might undergo a Dano double bill with this and Ruby Sparks, another picture indulging
his apparent obsession with updating crummy ‘80s Andrew McCarthy movies via an indie
twist (that one being Mannequin).
Although, Ruby Sparks is actually
quite watchable; it’s the Dano factor that will have you squirming.
Agree? Disagree? Mildly or vehemently? Let me know in the comments below.