Hank (Paul Dano) wants to kill himself. He strands himself on a deserted beach where he finds a dark cave to hang himself. Just as he’s set to hang himself, he sees a dead corpse (Daniel Radcliffe) washing on the shore. The corpse provides Hank with a mission. By discovering somebody more pathetic, disconnected, and dead than he is, Hank sets out to make Manny, the corpse, whole again. With somebody to cling to, or actually clinging to him, Hank finally figures out that he wants to make it home.
If this set up sounds insufferably twee and ripe for indie movie cliches, you’re not entirely wrong. Hank is yet another in a long line of broken young white men isolated from themselves and from the world at large who have to figure out how to come back around and survive in the world. But, directors Daniels aren’t happy with making a knock-off of Harold and Maude or a Zach Braff movie. Instead, they literalize the metaphorical language that surrounds these narratives, creating a new form of metaphor for this all too common narrative.
Manny isn’t just a corpse, he’s a talking, farting, boner-having corpse that also spews up gallons of drinking water, fires bullet nuts from his mouth, and catapults crutches to the top of hillsides. Because he’s immobile, Hank has to carry him on his back making him as much of a burden as he is a tool of progress. Separate, they’re damaged people drifting around in the world. Together, they form the yin and yang of a seriously damaged person. Hank is a repressed, depressed, suicidal super-ego who has to nurture Manny’s underdeveloped id back to life through a bizarre series of faux-life events recreated through forest-made set recreations that would make Michel Gondry cream his pants.
In its way, Swiss Army Man is a straight male indie movie edition of Gravity, or at least the metaphor of Gravity. A broken man has to piece himself back together in order to claw his way back to humanity. He has to teach himself how to live, and survive in a world that’s foreign and uninviting. Hank even has to teach Manny how to love and search for love, citing an obsession with a woman on a bus whom he never says hi to (yet is the permanent background on his phone).
The heightened twee sensibility is constantly undercut by a juvenile sense of humor. Manny turns a fear of farting in front of people into a life lesson on the repression of polite company. The dream like fantasies often feature Hank dressed in a twee drag and falling in love with Manny in a sick form of fantasy fulfillment; a form of self-masturbation that Hank has already rejected. Once you think you have a handle on all that, Daniels undercuts it all with a finale that throws everything you just saw into sharp relief, completely pulling the rug from under the audience.
Directors Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan, collectively known as Daniels, are best known for the music video Turn Down For What, the daggering dance video that added in out of control private parts and apartment building destruction to the mass amounts of dry humping. But, 2 years ago, The Solute featured their epic multi-story short film Interesting Ball, a profound bit of absurdia that reaches epic heights of ecstasy in its pursuit of…who knows what. Swiss Army Man follows in the same form of pseudo-profundity as Interesting Ball: it’s a very skewed version of familiar tropes, it almost feels like it means something, it’s loads of fun, and you’ve never seen anything quite like it before. It sums itself up with its closing line of dialogue, “WHAT THE FUCK?!”
